Accessibility and Glean: an update

We recently published an accessibility statement, available on the company website in the footer at glean.co/accessibility-statement. This demonstrates our commitment to accessibility, creating inclusive technology, and to all our users.

But there’s so much more!

First off, we’ve done away with accessibility Tuesdays!

Why the change?

The reason for having a day dedicated to accessibility was a backlog of accessibility improvements that we needed to spend time working through. But we decided to scrap it.

How is that an improvement you may ask?

Thanks to adding a second accessibility specialist to the team, plus lots of hard work, backlog items for accessibility are minimal. So, rather than focusing on accessibility one day a week, it is just part of what we do.

Our VPAT

We have updated our Voluntary Product Accessibility Template or VPAT, available on request.

In our latest VPAT we only have one ‘Does not support’ finding relating to our keyboard shortcut for posting notes. We have an item in our backlog to allow disabling of the shortcut for those that need those shortcuts for other things. Once implemented we will only have four ‘partially supports’ for level AA and we are looking into those.

What else have we done?

Quite a lot really!

• We are having conversations about accessible user experience during the design phase to ensure that great features to improve learning can be used by everyone. Ensuring the user experience works for everyone, no matter how you interact with Glean, is very important to us.

• We have an inhouse accessibility newsletter highlighting best practices and the latest innovations ensuring we are always looking for ways to improve, even if we already meet the standard.

Our Accessibility Champions evaluate tools and processes that can help us to continuously improve.

• We are looking at our whole procurement process to make sure that the systems we use are also accessible.

And we’re not finished there. We have dedicated time to look at what the next version of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) will mean for us and to be ahead of the changes so our users benefit first. There are some big changes planned and it is important to us to understand what they are and how to make sure that we are complying with them.

We welcome your feedback on accessibility. You can reach out to us by email at help@glean.co.