Disability and Accessibility Trends in 2024. Part 4 - The ESG / Business Ones

Welcome to Mostly Unlearning, a newsletter that amplifies accessibility and disability voices towards more impactful commercial and human outcomes.

In today's edition, I’ll finish a four-part series looking forward to 2024 and share some thoughts on where and how to set up accessibility and disability programs for successful outcomes.

But first, welcome!

Welcome to the 100's of new subscribers who've found me and the Mostly Unlearning newsletter from a recent #RepresentationMatters post.

I know first-hand how, as a disabled person, how seeing people like you in leadership positions, public figures, media, and content helps to feel less alone. It provides implicit, unsaid permission to be disabled in public and professional spaces.

I hope that by sharing moments of #DisabilityLeadership and highlighting the invisible community around us, we can normalise disability, encourage senior leaders to disclose, and feel more comfortable taking up the space we need in the places where we exist.

Which is literally everywhere, by the way.

Onto today's edition and finishing off the 2024 trends series.

Part Four: The ESG / Business Ones

2024 will continue to see accessibility as a business strategy with recognition of the commercial and social benefits of accessibility.

• Accessibility trend towards customer experience and business excellence.
• Increasingly see disability and accessibility within the social stream of ESG (environment, social, governance).

• Digital accessibility push, particularly throughout the EU, as businesses strive to comply with the incoming Digital Services Act.
• Digital inequality and connectivity as a human rights issue.
• Maturity in procurement and the importance of supply chains in directing spending towards accessible digital technology. Ensuring digital technology purchases routinely meet WCAG standards enables businesses to ensure employees, customers, and industry partners experience basic accessibility.

It's a maturity step. Not backlash.

Traditionally, disability rights and accessibility has been a facet of HR's Diversity, Equity and Inclusion efforts. And so it should; employee rights and accessible workplaces remain the expertise of HR teams. Many DEI teams have improved disability representation and hiring practices. They have worked hard to ensure that digital tools and physical spaces are welcoming and accommodating to employees with disabilities. They have done foundational work across their enterprises to shift thinking and build empathy.

Because you can't expect people to empathise with the needs of a disabled customer if they can't empathise with the person sitting next to them at work.

Progress has been made. Imperfect, patchy and maybe not as much as many would have liked. But progress has been made.

It might be time to hand the baton.

Increasingly, to realise commercial benefits through customer experience or business excellence, accessibility is finding its way into the remit of executives responsible for step changes in customer experience, business strategy, business excellence, transformation or sustainability.

In the spirit of unlearning, I reflect on my time in customer experience transformation, research and design. How obvious it is now that we missed entire audiences and left it to chance that someone would prioritise remediation for accessibility. Universal and inclusive design principles can go a long way in addressing this.

It has been in the area of sustainability and ESG that I've learned so much. ESG, which stands for Environmental, Social and Governance, is an approach to non-financial reporting that allows investors to make socially aware investment choices. It gives organisations different access to funds.

Sustainability teams are increasingly accountable for a broader range of sustainable business practices, reflected in ESG. They govern workstreams to international standards and, at their stage of maturity, require a step change in how business decisions are made. This is a potential home for the next stage of maturity - particularly as it brings strong governance, structure, and the need to uplift organisational maturity.

The most important thing of all? Sponsorship and leadership.

Accessibility requires a step change in how things are done, which suits a certain kind of person - sponsor, leader and team.

Matching a courageous leader with a business imperative and the metrics they are held accountable for will lead to impactful outcomes. At each stage of maturity, it might need to move into different parts of the business.

In today's future-focused edition, consider

• Progress has been made in DEI programs to date.
• What maturity step is needed, and whose rewards is this aligned to?
• Who and where might be best suited to the next stage of maturity?
• How you might role model disability leadership and demonstrate how representation matters.

Join the unlearning.

You can subscribe to learn with me. I'll share what I learn (and unlearn) about accessibility and disability. Together, we will consider the implications for impactful commercial and human outcomes.