In this week’s interview with Fair Play Talks, HSBC’s Group Head of Digital Experience and Accessibility Malintha Fernando MBE, shares the organisation’s vision to become the world’s most accessible bank through its Accessibility Hub programme, which won the Disability Smart Award for Learning and Development this year.
Fair Play Talks: As the winner of the Disability Smart Learning and Development Award, can you share a bit of background on why you entered the award and why you won it?
Malintha Fernando: HSBC’s ambition is to be the world’s most accessible bank. Over the past 10 years, we’ve been working hard to make that happen. Entering awards like the Disability Smart Awards gives us feedback from the disability community on how we’re progressing to reach that goal. Accessibility Hub is one of the “hero projects” for HSBC’s programme to make all our e-learning accessible, so it was the perfect thing to enter for this feedback.
We’ve always been supporters of the Business Disability Forum, having gained a lot of advice from them over the years, so recognition from their awards for the excellence and innovation of Accessibility Hub is a good sign we’re getting things right. We are excited about making the Hub publicly available so other organisations can benefit from it in the way HSBC staff have. The awards also help us prove to people with disabilities who may want to work for us that we are an organisation that doesn’t just say the right things about workplace inclusion, but also deliver accessible e-learning and tools to ensure our staff who have disabilities can thrive in their jobs.
Fair Play Talks: Why is it important for HSBC to make e-learning accessible for all?
Malintha Fernando: We want HSBC to be a great place to work by valuing the physical and mental health and wellbeing of all our workers, including disabled people, and have established thoughtful, engaging and inclusive workplace practices to support that. This reaches across the full employee journey. People want to work in a place where their skills are welcomed, nurtured and grown, throughout their career.
In 2023, a key part of this is ensuring our digital channels are accessible. We’ve taken all our experience from delivering accessibility for customers and put it into our staff accessibility programme. Our websites and social media show we are an inclusive employer. The digital tools used in our recruitment are accessible to support candidates with disabilities to apply and interview for our vacancies. We’re continually working to ensure staff with disabilities can use all internal communications and tools needed in their jobs; and are working to ensure all our staff experience a level playing field when it comes to their career development within the bank.
E-learning is key to all our staff’s onboarding and development during their time at the bank. Our online courses are the one digital tool touched by every single HSBC employee, from contact centre staff to our CEO. So it’s essential that all of our e-learning is accessible for all.
Fair Play Talks: Can you share a bit more detail about your eLearning course developed to upskill your staff, which provided real insight to the everyday experiences of disabled people through the “Rachel looking for love” film and documentaries, and how this resulted in HSBC Accessibility Hub?
Malintha Fernando: HSBC serves 40 million customers in 64 countries. To ensure accessibility to all our customers, we need all our staff, contractors and suppliers to understand and deliver accessibility in their work. This is a huge challenge, with 235,000 staff globally creating digital documents internally, and 30,000+ working specifically on digital/IT projects. Those who don’t create digital products but commission and use them – for example, in recruitment, HR and facilities teams – also need understanding, to deliver an approach to improving disability knowledge across the whole organisation. This understanding needs to extend outside HSBC too – we work with marketing and digital agencies worldwide and buy digital tools for staff use from hundreds of digital vendors.
In 2016, HSBC established one of the most comprehensive accessibility training programmes in the world, for designers, developers, content authors, testers, and product managers of digital products. We also created a programme of events internationally to let thousands of wider staff know why accessibility is important. But that wasn’t enough. We needed a way of getting that training to our whole global workforce, often working from home, whenever best suits them. E-learning was an obvious route to achieve this. This is in addition to our virtual classroom training, other e-learning and ongoing awareness events. The challenge was how to make it as inspirational and impactful as our events.
We worked with partners like Hassell Inclusion and Attic Media to create a platform that is an accessible, inspirational, impactful Accessibility Awareness e-learning course to upskill everyone. The e-learning focuses around high- quality videos with a fictional narrative which enables learners to understand and empathise with the life experiences of people with disabilities, focused around the lesser-understood condition of Multiple Sclerosis, co-written and acted by people with these conditions themselves. It also includes documentaries starring people with other disabilities, background information, and gamified simulations of the challenges people with vision and motor impairments often have with websites which accessibility helps to address.
The course is raising the awareness and empathy of staff across all of HSBC, so they know why accessibility is so important to us. As one manager said: “E-learning at work has never brought a tear to my eye before. I’m so excited to see the bank not just ticking the box, but approaching this empathetically and creatively.”
Fair Play Talks: Can you share some of the challenges that disabled employees face – and how your project helped to overcome some of those challenges?
Malintha Fernando: One challenge that disabled employees often face is that, in the past, e-learning could be engaging, or accessible, but not both. The Accessibility Hub needed to deliver both. The course needed to be unquestionably accessible, as well as provide an example of how accessible and creative e-learning could be for all our e-learning suppliers.
Another challenge is that, while WCAG 2.1 AA is a good set of guidelines for websites, our user research with staff with disabilities found that they needed e-learning to go beyond those guidelines to best support their learning. Accessibility Hub was a chance to experiment with the feasibility of meeting these needs. So it includes full audio-description (which is rarely delivered, even though it is WCAG A), accessibility preferences for those who learn more easily if they can easily change the colours or text size of text materials to better suit their preferences (which is in WCAG AAA), and other preferences uncovered in our user-research and tested in user-testing with people with disabilities.
One external dyslexic user said “This isn’t available on the learning platform I use. It’s very good, quick, and simple, it makes a big difference for me…” This additional layer of support beyond WCAG is now becoming standard in all HSBC e-learning.
Fair Play Talks: Can your approach be easily adopted by other organisations in your sector and others?
Malintha Fernando: Absolutely. When organisations engage with their staff with disabilities to fully understand their needs, deliver to those needs, and check that delivery through user testing with those same staff, great things happen. E-learning isn’t like the web. Its success metric should be whether all staff are able to learn from it, not just use it. No one will thank you for unengaging, confusing, inaccessible e-learning. It needs to deliver all those. We would love to see other organisations use the Hub when we make it free to use for everyone.
Fair Play Talks: What advice do you have for organisations wanting to improve e-learning for all?
Malintha Fernando: Fundamentally, you have to take your suppliers with you on your accessibility journey. Like most organisations, HSBC has many suppliers who co-create much of our e-learning – including courses and the learning management system platforms they sit on. So it’s important to ensure suppliers know the level of accessibility we require from their work in RFPs and contracts, and are able to deliver that accessibility alongside creativity and clarity in the learning experience they create. We’ve embedded accessibility in our procurement process for e-learning, check all e-learning is accessible before it goes live, and have been offering our e-learning suppliers training and support to help them make their work accessible, much as we do for our staff who create our websites and mobile apps.
One practical thing we can do to help: we’ve committed to training over 1000 people from outside HSBC in accessibility over the next year. So, if organisations and their e-learning companies wish to access this training to help make their e-learning available for all, please contact group.brand.digital@hsbc.com.
Fair Play Talks: Finally, how did you feel about winning this year’s Disability Smart Award?
Malintha Fernando: We’re delighted to have won the award. It’s always helpful for our work to be recognised publicly, especially from such prestigious awards, we know we’re getting this right when we achieve such accolades. We put a lot of time and effort into Accessibility Hub, and this recognition, along with the other awards we’ve won for our e-learning, reinforces to our internal stakeholders that it was worth it. When we make Accessibility Hub publicly available later this year for other organisations to use, the award will help us promote it to them as well worth the time of their staff to learn from, to help them accelerate in their accessibility journeys too.
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