One of our early adopters of Compliance Guardian Online – which was made generally available this week – was the London, England-based Business Disability Forum (BDF). This international accessibility organization provides advice and guidance to employers and, in their words, “build(s) disability-smart organizations to improve business performance by increasing confidence, accessibility, productivity, and profitability.”
They do this by bringing together businesses, disabled opinion leaders, and government agencies to understand what needs to change to ensure disabled people are treated fairly and given the opportunity contribute to business success, society, and economic growth.
The BDF have often found that one of the biggest barriers to employing individuals is the accessibility of organisations’ websites. It is an invisible problem to the employer, but a huge potential barrier to the potential employee. Most organisations use websites and the internet as a central part of their employment campaign, but many do not consider building their website so it is fully accessible – especially to those with disabilities. I say it is an “invisible problem” because since the potential employee cannot use the website due to its inaccessibility, they cannot (or do not) complain – meaning the employer remains unaware of the potential talent they have unwittingly turned away.
Over time, accessibility standards have been developed – including the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) – that allow organisations to assess their websites. Of course, in an ideal world people could look at each web page and give feedback, but this process is expensive, and web content much to large, to be an effective and efficient solution. Enter Compliance Guardian Online, allowing BDF, with a few clicks, to scan recruitment websites and the recruitment pages of their members’ websites to easily find violations and report on their compliance with accessibility standards and issues. One of the barriers to doing this has been the limitation of available scanning tools, but Compliance Guardian Online utilizes a Software as a Service (SaaS) model running on Microsoft Azure with no installation that still allows “headless” browser scanning as well as the ability to simulate user input of forms, rather than simply static web pages. The solution is already showing value and providing information on recruiters’ websites for the BDF, allowing the organization to audit and provide reports for its members faster than ever before.
The value to BDF and their customers is simple: By providing a compliance status against these publically available standards, BDF can assist their member organisations to provide a better and more accessible service to potential employees that does not turn down or discourage talent with disabilities. This, in turn, helps the organizations attract the right people for the right job – to the benefit of all.
To learn more about how the BDF is befitting from Compliance Guardian Online, read the new case study.
