Our strategy
We have a clear vision, which is:
“To make Skyscanner a flagship of disability inclusion, our products accessible to all, and travel planning easier for people with disabilities.”
And a simple strategy to support it:
- Raise awareness of accessibility and inclusive design across the business
- Increase adoption of accessibility best practices throughout the product development process
- Improve advocacy for disability inclusion internally and externally
What it looks like in practice
We monitor our progress against a digital accessibility maturity model (AbilityNet’s DAMM) to keep us on track and working on the right things.
Raising awareness
We’ve achieved a lot in a short period! We’ve been:
- Building an internal e-learning module for employees, delivering face-to-face training, plus rolling out an online training programme to Accessibility Champions
- Creating an internal Accessibility Hub full of helpful resources, which is growing day by day
- Running Empathy Labs across many of our offices and for every new cohort of employees at our Global Induction events
- Celebrating Global Accessibility Awareness Day annually with talks from well-known disabled advocates, blogs, and training sessions
- Working with universities and other tertiary education organisations to raise awareness with students
Increasing adoption
This takes time and dedicated efforts. We’ve been:
- Encouraging Designers to consider accessibility from initial concept design, and add accessibility annotations to their design specifications
- Embedding accessibility into our build processes and Production Standards
- Making our Design System components accessible
- Regularly auditing our products to understand where we are today, how much we have to do, and what to focus on
- Carrying out usability tests with disabled travellers
Improving advocacy
Internally, we’ve been:
- Growing an active internal accessibility Slack channel
- Nurturing an engaged Accessibility Champions Network, who attend regular meet-ups and work together in discipline-specific pods
- Encouraging Accessibility Champions to talk to their teams about accessibility to get others interested and involved
- Talking about accessibility in company-wide meetings, at any opportunity!
External advocacy has been done through:
- Commissioning photography showing disabled people enjoying travel across the world
- Including illustrations of disabled people in our artwork
- Hosting Instagram Lives with disabled travellers
- Sharing our experiences externally on podcasts, at conferences and with other businesses
More widely, we are:
- Proud members of The Valuable 500 and publicly committing to improving disability inclusion
- Co-founders of the external global Champions of Accessibility Network (CAN)
Our team
This is not the work of one person alone. With our Chief Product Officer, Piero Sierra, as Exec sponsor, Heather Hepburn runs our accessibility programme supported by Gert-Jan Vercauteren, our Lead Accessibility Engineer.
They’ve built a strong network of Accessibility Champions to help them embed accessibility best practice across all areas of the business.
We want to share these best practices with you. You can find out more on our How to get started page or on our Partner Accessibility Hub