Launching The Stepstone Group’s Accessibility Journey
The Stepstone Group built up a successful digital accessibility practice in less than two years. Learn from its experiences about how you can do this too.
- Mimouna Mahdaoui, Senior Manager - Accessibility, The Stepstone Group
The Stepstone Group, an online recruitment company, began focusing on accessibility in 2023. To stay true to its mission of creating a fair and efficient job market where everyone can find the right role through innovative technology, the company partnered with AbilityNet.
Understanding The Stepstone Group’s accessibility maturity
The Stepstone Group needed to understand its baseline; how well it was doing with digital accessibility; its existing good practices and gaps.
That’s why AbilityNet started by delivering the Digital Accessibility Maturity Model (DAMM), our tried-and-tested accessibility assessment approach. The process creates a roadmap, gauging where an organisation is now, where it wants to be, and achievable steps to get there.
Mimouna from The Stepstone Group explains the previous situation with digital accessibility at The Stepstone Group prior to AbilityNet's involvement: "Over time, digital accessibility had disappeared as a priority across our product and technology teams. There was not one check in place across the product lifecycle."
Following the assessment, the bespoke DAMM report identified around 25 key actions. Over time these actions clustered into three key pillars, which became The Stepstone Group's accessibility strategy:
- Training - making sure all teams are aware of the importance of digital accessibility, share common knowledge, understand the organisation’s goals, and have access to tools and resources to do their jobs well.
- User testing – combine website/digital audits with research and testing with disabled users to ensure improvements are user-led.
- Prioritising Accessibility – communicate internally and externally about its accessibility goals.
"The Digital Accessibility Maturity Model (DAMM) helped us to understand our baseline, and benefit from AbilityNet's guidance to take action. The DAMM enabled us to build a long-term digital compliance and governance programme, with accessibility at the core," says Mimouna.
Prioritising digital accessibility through User Research
Mimouna knew that for the DAMM recommendations to truly work, that digital accessibility had to be understood and prioritised across the organisation.
Although an accessibility audit gives useful action points, Mimouna wanted to tell a story, to encourage her colleagues to engage with the importance of digital accessibility.
So, AbilityNet and The Stepstone Group co-designed a bespoke user research project to explore the stories and barriers disabled people face in the job market. AbilityNet recruited participants from our database and collaborated on the interview scripts and a usability testing plan.
The findings from the research were translated into a storytelling video used to train Stepstone colleagues. This demystified perceptions of disabled users’ job seeking habits, challenged biases, and highlighted the features of their current system that are useful to disabled users.
The importance of accessible recruitment
Mimouna has used the video across the organisation, using example snippets to highlight different areas of digital accessibility.
Ashley Peacock, Accessibility Consultant for AbilityNet reflected on the workshop sessions with disabled users:
“For me, it was listening to people’s stories of speaking several languages and having several master's degrees, yet they were eliminated from recruitment pools, that highlighted the importance of accessible recruitment. It really bought to life the untapped talent pool.”
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The videos and overall outcomes from the DAMM, along with training colleagues have helped The Stepstone Group embed the importance of digital accessibility.
Mimouna told us that ‘quality over quantity’ was essential to ensure a sustainable approach. Instead of implementing every DAMM recommendation straight away, she wanted the culture to be engaged with its aims first.
She did this by forming a small group of ‘Accessibility Champions’ including representatives from different teams across the organisation. The group took part in AbilityNet training and then became advocates for Digital Accessibility.
Two years later, this approach has been very successful, with people from across the organisation coming to Mimouna with digital accessibility project ideas: “Patience is key, as some recommendations worked better, once we had built an invested culture,” she said.
Reflecting on starting a digital accessibility journey
Mimouna’s two takeaways from spearheading The Stepstone Group’s digital accessibility journey are:
- Pragmatism is important – taking things step by step. “When I started on accessibility work I really didn’t know where to start. Without the guidance from AbilityNet I would’ve been misled. AbilityNet being a charity and in the accessibility community for so long, means we align in values of doing the right thing. Pragmatism doesn’t have to be a bad thing.”
- Partnership working – AbilityNet is flexible and supportive. “I never felt like there’s something AbilityNet can’t do. I can’t say how much I've learnt!”
Looking forward, The Stepstone Group wants to focus more on User Research, continuing to conduct digital audits and attend training. It wants to use its new understanding of digital accessibility to encourage its organisational partners to also embrace making digital inclusion improvements.
How AbilityNet can help
The Stepstone Group embedded digital accessibility skills and best practices in the organisation in less than two years. You can do this too.
Speak to us about our Digital Accessibility Maturity Model to learn how to create a tried-and-tested roadmap for your accessibility strategy.
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