ANZ’s commitment to digital accessibility
Anchal Jain, Maxim Rioumine and Cameron Chong take the lead on improving digital accessibility for all ANZ employees.
Anchal Jain has long been focused on accessibility. Five years before joining ANZ, she built her own app, ‘Cash Gain’, so people of all abilities could enjoy and benefit from online shopping to their fullest.
Her ANZ colleagues, Maxim Rioumine and Cameron Chong, built a tool in three months that streamlines how ANZ diagnoses and fixes accessibility deficits in apps.
This intersection of passion, curiosity and technical prowess explains why ANZ is a leader in digital employee accessibility.
‘For some, the driver of digital accessibility is legislation. For us it’s our purpose of shaping a world where all people and communities thrive. So, when ANZ thinks about accessibility, we go above and beyond and do it from the viewpoint of all our employees and customers,’ notes Group Executive for Technology, and Executive Sponsor for Accessibility, Gerard Florian.
This wholistic approach was the main reason Anchal accepted an offer to join ANZ permanently as Accessibility Testing Lead at the Group Capability Centre in Bengaluru in November 2023.
‘I’ve been in the digital accessibility field for about 10 years now; ever since I encountered a colleague with low vision using a screen reader to code. This chance encounter left an indelible mark on me and changed the course of my career!
‘Before interviewing at ANZ, I hadn’t encountered an organization who placed the experience of employees on equal footing with customers. It was an eye-opener,’ she said.
ANZ believes digital accessibility is about empowering all employees to access information, collaborate effectively, and perform their best work without any barriers.
By prioritising accessibility in internal tools and applications, ANZ are demonstrating their dedication to creating a workplace where everyone has equal opportunities for growth and success. ‘This is the next frontier of digital accessibility,’ Anchal said.
Ensuring that collaboration tools, productivity tools, and work administration platforms – especially those used by ANZ’s global team of more than 6,000 engineers – comply with ANZ’s accessibility standards is a large part of Anchal and the accessibility team’s role.
‘Our approach is collaborative. Any accessibility defects that we identify during testing are proactively addressed with the vendor. Most of the vendors we’ve worked with, such as Microsoft, Visa, AWS and SAP, have demonstrated a strong commitment to inclusivity and collaboration.’
The other part of Anchal’s role is direct engagement with the business. This mostly involves working with developers and designers in two ways: testing and training.
The testing is done early in the development lifecycle with tools such as Reveal from Itty Bitty Apps, Accessibility Inspector, Accessibility Insights for web and windows, and various Deque Tools/APIs, along with screen readers JAWS, NVDA, Narrator and VoiceOver.
Soon ANZ will be adding their own tool to that list – Ta11y (short for Test Accessibility). ‘When we industrialise the Ta11y it will be revolutionary,’ said Anchal.
It was during a week-long innovation sprint that Cameron and Maxim saw an opportunity. ‘We were building the payments app centre at the time’ said Maxim, an ANZ software engineer.
‘The payments app centre is like a backstage for our payments engineers, except it keeps all the micro apps segmented (rather than sitting in a monolith). Before any apps can be injected into the repository, they need to be compliant to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).
‘We thought, instead of everyone doing their own micro app approvals one-by-one, how could we start from the top and automatically scan the apps to find any problems? And could we then get a head start on fixing any problems to make them WCAG compliant?’ Maxim said.
Cameron and Maxim called on engineers Sherry Zhang, David Liao and Dennis Darwis and together they built the foundational product in two weeks. The whole Ta11y build was done in three months.
‘As soon as we’d finished the build we realised there would be significant enterprise value,’ Maxim said. ‘Accessibility was the first and most obvious next divisional user of Ta11y outside of payments, but brand and onboarding could easily follow, too.’
When Ta11y is industrialised for use outside of the payments app centre, (September 2024), it will be integrated into ANZ engineering’s CICD pipeline - significantly reducing the time and effort required to deliver accessibility compliance for in-house apps.
In their ongoing bid to shift ‘even further left,’ the accessibility team will be providing online training to designers and developers. The sessions will be quarterly and feature training on how to use Github’s Co-pilot chat to help meet accessibility guidelines.
‘Designing accessible UIs can be challenging, especially for designers who may not have extensive experience with accessibility guidelines,’ Anchal said.
‘We help them to effectively collaborate with AI assistants to generate accessible design suggestions such as colour contrast ratios, alternative text for images, and keyboard navigation optimisations.’
AI also powers ANZ’s intelligent UI component library, ‘horizon.’ The algorithms within horizon dynamically adapt components to meet the specific accessibility needs of the user. This results in the components being universally accessible without sacrificing design flexibility or creativity.
While AI has a part to play in employee digital accessibility - which will undoubtably increase over time - people are very much front and centre. ‘We work closely with ANZ’s Abilities Employee Network to solve problems they might encounter in their day-to-day work.
‘Recently, a person in the contact centre reported an issue they were having with one of the portals they use. We spoke with the vendor on their behalf, and they promptly fixed the problem for us,’ Anchal said.
‘Knowing that we’re making a positive difference to people’s working life is really why I do this.’
Since Anchal has been with ANZ she and the team have improved the accessibility of many applications across the organisation. They have also made their mark outside of ANZ, with one large vendor rolling out an ANZ-requested fix to their global customer base.
A great sign of things to come.
Anchal Jain is the Accessibility Testing Lead at ANZ. She specialises in digital accessibility - assisting developers by focusing on training, testing, and remediation so that products are accessible to all users, regardless of their abilities. Her approach is collaborative and proactive, emphasising early integration of accessibility practices in the design and development phases and fostering a culture of inclusivity from the outset.
Maxim Rioumine is a software engineer at ANZ. He has a Masters in Interaction Design and makes an impact within corporations by using his broad understanding of technology to bridge the gap between business needs and the technology needed to achieve them.
Cameron Chong is a senior UX designer at ANZ.
Sherry Zhang, David Liao and Dennis Darwis are software engineers at ANZ.
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