Payfont: achieving compliance with BS 8878
The brief
Payfont specialise in data protection, securing customer and corporate data via Identity Assurance Management solutions.
They wanted to ensure that all of their products were accessible to the widest demographic reach possible and that their work would contribute to making people’s everyday tasks simpler.
They needed to prove to licensees of their security technology that, not only was their current product suite accessible now, but that licensees could rely on them to maintain and improve the suite’s accessibility over time because they had embedded the right policies and training to keep it that way.
After reading our CEO’s book “Including your missing 20% by embedding web and mobile accessibility” and implementing a lot of the recommendations in it themselves, they got in touch.
They asked us to check their work on policies and practices, and help them to do anything else that was necessary to achieve compliance with BS 8878 before their public launch.
We were delighted to work with the creators of BS 8878 to achieve our goal of compliance with such a crucial standard to include our missing 20% of users - in tandem this has allowed us to implement a solid foundation on which we can continue to develop our commitment to our wider and longer term accessibility and usability aims within our products. Throughout, it was a pleasure working with Jonathan and his team to achieve this.
Our approach
Our approach was twofold.
Firstly we reviewed their policy documentation, identifying strengths and weaknesses, and ran workshops at their offices in Edinburgh with their team leads to update the necessary policies to fill the gaps.
Secondly, we ran training courses for their product creation teams, to ensure that they were capable of creating accessible products, and supported the development and testing of their first two products via:
- The creation of Web Product Accessibility Policies to capture the accessibility requirements, aims and plan for each product.
- The creation of a messaging roadmap to promote their accessibility work as a potential differentiator between their company and their competitors.
- Accessibility audits to check that each final product at launch lived up to its accessibility aims, and was consistent with their accessibility messaging
Outcomes
We accredited Payfont against BS 8878, which they were able to show to licensees to prove their best practice process.
