Introducing accessibility to The Financial Times website, and the journey from being generally oblivious about a11y to making it a core process part.

In 2016, The Financial Times launched a new version of our website, FT.com, to great success. It broke ground on key areas in which we’d set out to excel and measured very closely, like performance, resilience and usability. 

But one day, and rather serendipitously, we realized we had largely forgotten to measure one thing: accessibility. And you can’t improve what you don’t measure. 

In this talk, I will go over how we introduced accessibility to the The Financial Times website, and our journey from being generally oblivious about accessibility to making it a core part of our process across multiple divisions. 

I will share the roadblocks we encountered and lessons that we learned along the way as well as practical solutions you can implement in your project today, regardless of available time, resources, or support.