Inclusive by design: the story behind our Inclusivity Toolkit

• Our Inclusivity Toolkit consolidates information, tools, and best practice examples related to inclusivity into a single touchpoint. It draws on learnings from key projects to date, including the extensive work done on the UK Government’s Covid-19 app used across England and Wales.

• The toolkit is a guide to how we can introduce the topic to clients and have meaningful discussions about inclusivity. It also touches on each point of the journey we go on with customers and colleagues, enabling us to have the right conversations at the right times.

• When speaking to the toolkit authors, they mention that this is only the beginning for the Inclusivity Toolkit. It has been specifically designed to be an ever-evolving resource, with subsequent insights adding more richness and detail over time.

We engaged with three members of the team instrumental to our recently-launched Inclusivity Toolkit creation: Andy Folland (Content Manager), Deepthi Justine (QA Engineer) and Carolyn Warburton (Customer Research Consultant), to find out more.

What’s in the Inclusivity Toolkit?

Our Toolkit consolidates information, tools, and best practice examples related to inclusivity into a single touchpoint. It draws on learnings from key projects to date, including the extensive work done on the UK Government’s Covid-19 app used across England and Wales. By bringing together all this insight and experience, and making it accessible to everyone within the organisation, we aim to ensure inclusivity remains a central focus in all Zühlke projects. The resources are hosted on our internal wiki platform that facilitates easy access of the existing knowledge base, with scalability to match the Toolkit's growth over time.

Discussing this initiative, Deepthi emphasises its practical uses. “It’s a guide to how we can introduce the topic to clients and have meaningful discussions about inclusivity,” she explains. 
Carolyn also highlights its potentially far-reaching impact. 

Users and use cases

The target audience for the Inclusivity Toolkit, given its broad impact, is understandably extensive. Deepthi highlights its relevance to colleagues in Business Development for one. “By equipping them with the right case studies and talking points, they can confidently communicate the importance of considering inclusivity right from the start of a project when engaging with clients,” she explains. Echoing this view, Carolyn notes that the Toolkit enables us to standardise best practices and apply learnings from one job to the next. “Ultimately, it allows us to hold ourselves to the same standard across all our projects,” she says.

The team also identifies other potential users, including UX Designers who need to verify the accessibility of their designs, and Developers tasked with creating backend support for tools like screen readers. But to put it simply, Andy explains that the resources are really for everyone at Zühlke in one way or another. “It’s a way of making this issue real for people so that they can understand exactly why it is important, even if you’re coming into the topic totally cold,” he says.

The importance of accessibility

Becoming an authority on inclusive design is important for our business and several factors are currently sharpening the focus on this area within our industry. Deepthi highlights the legal requirement for one.

“We have had legislation that has outlined the rules and guidelines around accessibility in the UK since 2010,”

Deepthi points out. Additionally, Andy references the European Accessibility Act, set to take effect in 2025, which will mandate accessibility standards for all digital products and services. This all reinforces the importance of considering inclusivity in our work, a process supported by the Toolkit.

While compliance is understandably key, Andy emphasises that the opportunities unlocked by inclusive approach are very real too.

Carolyn expands on this, detailing how the Toolkit equips our teams for success throughout a project's lifecycle. “It offers guidelines on essential considerations at each stage, from developing customer profiles to designing inclusively and conducting appropriate checks during the QA phase,” she states. The financial impact of this approach can therefore be significant. “If you only pick up an issue after all the code has been built, then a fix is likely to be both expensive and time-consuming, and using the Toolkit avoids that complication” she concludes.

Where to from here?

For now, there is a specific focus on sharing the resource with colleagues, so that all Zühlkees are aware of what is available and how it influences our work. The current Toolkit has been spearheaded by Zühlke in the UK, and while some of the details may be different from location to location, the overall approach to inclusive design is applicable to everyone in the global organisation.

When speaking to the three team members, all of them mention that this is only the beginning for the Inclusivity Toolkit. It has been specifically designed to be an ever-evolving resource, with subsequent insights adding more richness and detail over time.

“I believe that technology can do great things and a tool like this Inclusive Toolkit helps us to ensure the benefits are felt by all users, now and into the future,”

Carolyn concludes.