The importance of accessibility to bridge the customer experience

Digital accessibility ensures everyone can access our services, regardless of their abilities. For example, people with motor impairments like Parkinson’s disease can use voice commands or specialised keyboards to navigate our website. Accessible digital services also enable individuals who are blind or have severely impaired vision to use our mobile apps through screen readers. All images on our website have descriptive alt text, allowing users who have trouble seeing to understand the content through auditory descriptions. Accessibility also means people with cognitive disabilities can understand and interact with our content through simplified layouts and clear instructions. Accessible services ensure that everyone enjoys a better customer experience.

To guarantee a seamless customer experience, accessibility must bridge both digital and real-life interactions. As Karolina Baszarkiewicz, Chief Customer Officer in the Consumer Customers unit, emphasises, our customer base is diverse and spans all age groups; however, we often fail to adequately accommodate accessibility needs due to a lack of understanding and contextualisation.  

For instance, the need for more accessible experiences increases with age, and certain stages or events in life benefit significantly from more accessible services. So, we must stop treating accessibility as a niche need and highlight the true value that accessible services create. Think about a person holding a baby in one arm and using  OmaElisa on their phone with their free hand, or a person walking in bright sunlight trying to buy from our webshop, but not being able to because the contrast is too weak.  Ultimately, all customers benefit from enhanced accessibility.

The need for creating a business case around accessibility  

Understanding the business case for accessibility is essential. Ensuring that our services are accessible is both ethical and strategic, given that 101 million Europeans and 33.9% of people living in Finland have some form of disability, a number that will grow in the future. As Europeans are living longer than ever, the proportion of people benefitting from accessible services is increasing. Already today, almost half of people with disabilities in the EU are older than 65. The pace of change is the same in Finland, where the average Finn currently has a median age of 43.6 years, projected to rise to 47.03 by 2050. This means that digital accessibility is broadening Elisa’s market reach as this demographic shift progresses.

A survey of 1,033 business decision-makers in the U.S. found that 87% reported an improved user experience, 81% claimed increased customer satisfaction, and 79% noted improved brand reputation due to digital accessibility efforts. This aligns with our long-term strategy at Elisa, where sustainability and accessibility are intertwined, as highlighted by Minna Kröger, VP for  Sustainability from the Communications and Sustainability team. Ensuring compliance with EU accessibility regulations avoids costly lawsuits while helping Elisa position itself as a leader in corporate responsibility. To achieve this, accessibility advocates across Elisa agree that we need more business cases around accessibility.

“When we stop looking only at demographic figures and truly contextualise the impact accessible services have, we can size realistic business opportunities and market estimates, and overcome customer experience gaps”, Karolina Baszarkiewicz emphasises, “but this needs a concerted, holistic approach.”  These cases are necessary to move accessibility away from its niche position and truly create business opportunities around the premise of “doing the right thing”, agrees Minna Kröger. Ensuring compliance with EU accessibility regulations is a must – but Elisa’s ambition must go beyond mere compliance. As one of the most sustainable companies in the world, Kröger reminds us that in order to be the service provider of choice, we must set our ambitions high. Therefore, Elisa’s goal must be to be a trailblazer and advocate for accessibility and sustainability work by setting new standards in easy-to-use services.

Elisa addressing digital accessibility through a multi-level effort

Elisa’s commitment to digital accessibility is evident in several ongoing initiatives. For example, Elisa’s Accessibility Index was updated to measure technical and process improvements more effectively, moving beyond just counting audits, as Jussi Mantere, Head of Design in Production’s  Digital Services team, explains. This initiative demonstrates that accessibility and sustainability require a systematic approach combining common measures, metrics and continuous assessments across organisational units.

One positive example is Elisa’s continuous efforts to improve the Elisa Design System (EDS), which incorporates accessibility into requirement elicitation, ensuring designers and developers produce accessible components. “Making the Elisa Design System components over 90% accessible was groundwork. Our learnings from this undertaking also influence our approach in the upcoming years.” Jussi Mantere notes.  

To achieve systemic, procedural change that goes beyond just technical accessibility, the process of designing and developing EDS components has shifted to being accessible by default, the use of EDS components is tracked, and an Accessibility Taskforce has been established to continuously help teams with designing, developing and managing accessible products.  

Additionally, the Accessibility Taskforce focuses on one product area at a time. The goal is to educate and support crucial people in production (i.e., digital product owners, designers, and developers) to give them the necessary understanding and tools to create accessible digital services.

To raise awareness throughout the organisation, Elisa has been supporting one-time initiatives such as Accessibility Awareness Day 2024. “At Elisa, we have the advantage that many Elisians talk about accessibility due to requirements coming from our bricks-and-mortar stores”, reflects Mantere on his surprise when he began his work at Elisa, “but we must build on this competence and ensure that there are no disconnects in teams.” As part of the efforts to educate and engage our employees about the importance of inclusive experiences, we have provided Elisians with simulation tools developed by Cambridge University. These tools give us a better understanding of the accessibility challenges people face using digital services, and they support us in more inclusive and informed decision-making at the concept stage, avoiding prohibitively expensive changes later on in the development process. These toolkits –  Cambridge Simulation Gloves, Cambridge Simulation Glasses, and Impairment Simulation Software –  can be borrowed at the Pasila and Tampere offices. These multi-level initiatives help to increase Elisa’s overall accessibility maturity and pave the way to a more integrated accessibility approach.

Sustainability, accessibility, and data privacy are integrated into the overall business strategy

Sustainable digitalisation is at the core of Elisa’s mission. Elevating the well-established connection between sustainability and accessibility into our overall business strategy places accessibility at the forefront of our mission and our sustainable digitalisation efforts. To achieve a long-term impact and business value, we need to sustain and accelerate Elisa’s accessibility efforts, especially in times of market volatility, reflects Minna Kröger, when asked about potential challenges. Ultimately, when we discuss Elisa’s mission of sustainable digitalisation, our first considerations need to be accessibility, sustainability and data privacy . This holistic approach ensures that accessibility is not just an add-on, but a fundamental component of our strategic vision.

In conclusion, integrating accessibility and sustainability into our business strategy is both a moral obligation and a strategic imperative. This approach enhances our brand reputation, drives future initiatives, aligns with our trajectory as a global benchmark in sustainability, and ensures our digital services are accessible to everyone. As Minna Kröger puts it, we need to take these actions to establish the narrative and to measure the long-term return on investment of accessibility, which ultimately supports management and operations in monitoring results and making decisions aligned with the ethics of doing the right thing and with our values as Elisians.

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