Our commitment
At EE, BT and Plusnet we want everyone to be able to access and interact with our websites and apps.
We work towards increasing the accessibility and usability of all our online communications by complying with level AA of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.2 (WCAG) as a minimum.
WCAG is the international standard that aims to make digital content accessible to everyone, regardless of any differences such as disabilities, technological access, language and geographic location.
We are continuously exploring ways to go beyond level AA of WCAG whenever it is feasible.
How we work
The Digital Accessibility team in EE, BT and Plusnet has a code of conduct which guides everything we do as digital accessibility professionals. It helps us to uphold high standards so that everyone we work with knows what to expect from us, and we know what to expect from each other.
We work to five principles:
- We work with our colleagues to make the EE and BT and Plusnet consumer digital websites and apps accessible for everyone.
- We speak with, rather than on behalf of, disabled people by creating opportunities to have direct dialogue with them.
- When we say that our work is about including everyone, we really mean it. This includes customers who might have technological restrictions due to affordability or available infrastructure.
- We seek to meet the WCAG AA standard as a minimum, but aim higher when possible.
- We are committed to continuous learning and knowledge share.
We work hand-in-hand with product owners, product and content designers, front-end engineers and user researchers to improve the accessibility and usability of our digital products.
We ensure that accessibility is factored into our library of reusable digital components so that agreed solutions can be put in place right across our sites and app.
Where possible we work with third party suppliers to ensure that the products and services they provide us with meet our accessibility standards.
We batch audit our web pages once a month to take the temperature of our accessibility health and monitor progress or regressions. We use a range of testing and assistive technologies as well as manual checks to monitor compliance.
Listening to our disabled customers
We work closely with user researchers to conduct research with disabled customers to get wider feedback on the effectiveness of our pages. We also work closely with our customer-facing retail teams to ensure that we act on feedback from disabled customers about our digital services.
Our sites and apps
We want as many people as possible to be able to use our websites and apps. That means our customers should be able to:
- Use their device settings to change colours, contrast levels and fonts
- Zoom in and out in our websites and apps (our pages support zooming in up to 200%)
- Operate a website or app using just a keyboard or any assistive technology
- Perceive and understand our websites and apps using a screen reader (including the most recent versions of JAWS, NVDA, Talkback and VoiceOver)
- Access our websites and apps while using affordable devices and with lower connection speeds.
We’ve also made the website text as simple as possible to understand by using plain language.
The accessibility of our websites and apps
Accessibility is always a work in progress. While we work hard to produce the most accessible experience for all, we still have issues related to legacy systems and the large number of changes made across our sites every day. There is always the risk of new issues being introduced despite our best efforts.
In areas where we fall short of what we’re hoping to achieve in terms of accessibility, we are working to address any outstanding issues or provide reasonable adjustments where possible.
Known problems include:
- Some videos might not have transcripts, close captions or alternative content (We are continuously working towards ensuring that all multimedia content has at least alternative content. However, this is challenge on material that changes very often such as sports clips)
- Not all features in some pages are keyboard accessible
- Not all features in some pages can be perceived using a screen reader
- Not all features in a few pages have the correct level of colour contrast between foreground and background
- It's not possible to view the screens in our app in landscape mode, although this feature will be available in the near future.
How to improve accessibility by changing the settings on your browser, laptop or mobile
Sometimes changing the settings on your own computer, device or web browser can improve the way you view and access websites and apps. Common settings you can change: