With more than 1 billion people with disabilities in the world, we believe that accessibility is essential to delivering on our mission to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.
In fact, our mission doesn’t begin and end with the products we create and the services we offer, it extends to engaging with our partners to build innovative and inclusive experiences. This story highlights how our Microsoft and ServiceNow teams are working together to manage our ServiceNow platform accessibility.
As a company, we engage with our strategic partners and our suppliers to share accessibility requirements and why accessibility is important in our employee experiences, which also benefits our mutual customers.
How accessibility conformance is managed inside Microsoft Digital
We in Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization, are ensuring that our engineering teams develop services and solutions that follow international accessibility standards and guidelines such as Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). Each group has processes to build products and services with accessibility as a key requirement. This includes addressing accessibility issues within specific timeframes based on factors such as population or volume of user base and severity of issues identified.
As a company, we engage with our strategic partners and our suppliers to share accessibility requirements and why accessibility is important in our employee experiences, which also benefits our mutual customers.
This article highlights some key practices that Microsoft and ServiceNow have adopted as part of our accessibility journey, practices that have resulted in us making more than 15 different experiences accessible to consumers, including our employees and vendors, support agents, risk managers, and process owners.
ServiceNow implementation
In July 2019, we and ServiceNow announced a strategic partnership where our two companies would work together to accelerate digital transformation for our enterprise and government customers. Through our established partnership with ServiceNow, we use the ServiceNow platform for internal helpdesk and ServiceDesk process automation, IT asset management, and integrated risk management.
Since then, our Microsoft Infrastructure Engineering Services (IES) team has engaged with ServiceNow in extensive accessibility assessments for platform components deployed in production, which has resulted in identifying a significant number of accessibility bugs at different severity levels. With such a high volume of issues, it became obvious that we needed to engage with ServiceNow to define a strategy to:
Tactically work on a short-term plan to fix the already identified accessibility bugs.
Define a long-term strategy and approach to weave accessibility into our software design and development stages.
Our teams at Microsoft and ServiceNow worked together to establish an engagement model that enables an accelerated path for issue resolution (get healthy) while ensuring new experiences are more accessible by the time they’re released to customers (stay healthy).
The challenge
As we and ServiceNow were partnering to define our approach and execution plan, we faced some challenges that we needed to address along the way:
- Scale. One of the immediate challenges was the high volume of accessibility bugs in various platform components that are serving different business units and owned by different teams, which was hard to track and manage without having dedicated teams from Microsoft and ServiceNow to track issues burndown.
- Expectations around urgency of accessibility bugs. Usually, a high severity bug translates to a service outage or production blockage. In this case, we had a high volume of critical and high severity issues raised to ServiceNow in a short period of time, which is hard for any support or engineering team to tackle in a short time frame.
- Product bugs versus customization related issues. While many bugs were escalated to ServiceNow as the platform service provider, some were related to custom UI components that were implemented inside Microsoft, so we had to establish a process to identify these issues and deal with them internally.
- Platform release cadence. ServiceNow follows a semi-annual release cycle for major platform upgrades. This brought the urgent need for a proactive approach to address accessibility in the design as opposed to the reactive mode of operation where we chase issues in already released versions every six months.
- Accessibility standards. While we and ServiceNow strive to trace accessibility towards the latest WCAG guidelines, some of ServiceNow deployed modules were still tracking against an older version of WCAG guidelines. This resulted in issues that weren’t addressed by ServiceNow during the design and development phases being identified by Microsoft as high severity bugs.
Microsoft and ServiceNow approach
Our teams at Microsoft and ServiceNow worked together to establish an engagement model that enables an accelerated path for issue resolution (get healthy) while ensuring new experiences are more accessible by the time they’re released to customers (stay healthy). Below are some recommended practices that our teams have adopted:
- Leadership support. Support always starts at the top. The senior leaders of both Microsoft and ServiceNow are committed to providing customers with accessible and inclusive services. With that in mind, accessibility conformance was a fixed agenda topic in leadership meetings, where they drove alignment on product roadmaps and provided the needed support and sponsorship to make the strategy shift.
- Culture shift. Improvement isn’t just about checklists and standards but a culture shift for any engineering organization. It’s what drove ServiceNow to establish a new organization—Accessibility Engineering—that’s chartered to influence how product groups work, build community, and expand awareness and expertise within ServiceNow’s different engineering teams.
- Engineering alignment. While our accessibility experts are aligned with ServiceNow engineering on accessibility issues burndown, our platform implementation team has participated in community and targeted events like ServiceNow’s Accessibility Product Advisory Council (PAC), which drove even tighter alignment on technology roadmaps and WCAG conformance plans. This collaboration has resulted in prioritizing WCAG conformity of UI components that are exposed to a larger user population. As an example, when our IT Service Management Service Portal got conformant to WCAG2.1AA, we witnessed an over 95 percent reduction in the volume of issues as compared to the previous year.
- Accessibility testing. Our Microsoft and ServiceNow teams built a clone environment of our production instance that runs a pre-release version of the platform. This is where all accessibility assessments and validations are performed, allowing our teams enough time to escalate issues to the appropriate ServiceNow engineering groups and work directly with them to address accessibility issues during the development of new releases of the ServiceNow platform. This drove a significant reduction in issue resolution time and ensured that new services and experiences are more accessible from day one.
- Community engagement. One of our inclusive design principles is to learn from diversity. One way to achieve this is by including people with disabilities throughout the development lifecycle, including members of the engineering and testing teams. This not only helps identify gaps early during the design of new services, but also helps accelerate accessibility testing and reduces the time needed to validate bug fixes. Likewise, ServiceNow is keen to hire people with disabilities in their engineering teams to ensure accessibility design is woven in the design of new versions of the platform.
- Contractual commitment. It’s crucial to formalize the relationship between business partners to prevent conflicts, mitigate risks, and increase operational efficiency. We and ServiceNow worked together to include accessibility language in legal contracts, including WCAG conformance plans, service level agreements (SLA) for response and resolution time of accessibility related issues, and commitments from both parties regarding accessibility conformance.
While we and ServiceNow have made good progress in the accessibility space, the journey doesn’t end here and there’s still a lot to do.
Realized outcome
After over 3 years on our journey, here are a few examples of the value realized by our teams:
- Reduction in volume of issues. We’ve seen a significant reduction (92 percent) in the volume of issues identified from new accessibility assessments compared to previous years’ assessments.
- Time to resolve. The average time taken to provide accessibility bug fixes has been cut in half thanks to the ability to test in pre-release versions of the platform and work directly with the engineering team during development.
- Engineering alignment on roadmaps. Through regular touchpoints with ServiceNow Engineering, our teams now have better insight on what’s coming in the roadmap, WCAG conformance plans, and ETA of major UI improvements in future releases.
- Alignment on standards. Microsoft and ServiceNow teams are more aligned on standards being followed (test matrixes, tools being used, accessibility standards, and more), making it easier for our teams to speak the same language, set a common quality bar, and reduce engineering churn.
- Efficiency gains. Time spent on reactive issue resolution is greatly reduced, allowing us to focus more on proactively improving the service and providing more accessible and inclusive experiences.
Lessons learned
While we and ServiceNow have made good progress in the accessibility space, the journey doesn’t end here and there’s still a lot to do. That said, here are some of the learnings and recommended practices our team has captured along this journey:
- Leadership engagement is crucial to success. To drive large scale initiatives, make sure the leadership team will sponsor the strategy shift and truly drive a culture change.
- Getting healthy is hard but staying healthy can be even harder. Make sure you have a plan to sustain accessibility conformance as the product changes over time.
- Try to avoid custom development on top of third-party or partner solutions and stay with out-of-the-box configuration as much as possible.
- It might take time to realize the gains from large scale initiatives, but make sure you start with a realistic plan and hold your partners and vendors accountable to it.
- Finally, accessibility conformance should be an integral part of the solution design. Educate your engineering teams and partners on how to build an accessible solution to minimize the need to address conformance issues after the fact.
What’s next
The journey doesn’t end here, in fact, it never ends. We’ll continue to evolve and find better ways to build new services and experiences and support our customers. In dealing with accessibility in particular, we’ll continue to focus on the cultural change as well as the compliance aspect and will continue to iterate and bring innovative ideas to truly empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.
Here are some things that we have learned along the way that should help you get started with rethinking accessibility at your company:
- Get leadership on board: It’s important to have support from top-level leaders. They can drive accessibility initiatives by discussing them in leadership meetings, aligning product roadmaps, and providing the necessary backing for the strategy shift.
- Foster an inclusive culture: Create a culture that values accessibility across your organization. Encourage dedicated accessibility teams to influence product development, build awareness, and share expertise. This cultural shift will help make accessibility a priority for everyone.
- Collaborate with engineers: Work together with accessibility experts and engineering teams. Participate in events and councils to align technology roadmaps and prioritize accessibility for user interface components. This collaboration reduces accessibility issues and speeds up problem-solving.
- Make it part of your partnerships: Include accessibility commitments in your contracts with business partners. Outline plans for meeting accessibility standards, set expectations for resolving accessibility issues promptly, and ensure both parties are committed to accessibility conformance.
Learn more about our approach to accessibility at Microsoft.
- Accessibility Guidelines and Requirements – Microsoft Style Guide | Microsoft Learn
- Accessibility Technology & Tools | Microsoft Accessibility
- Accessibility Resources & Training | Microsoft Accessibility
- Accessibility Center Strengthens Inclusion – ServiceNow Blog
- Commitment to Accessibility – ServiceNow Press
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