Accessibility in every moment

Our Accessibility Program spans workplace, technology, and operations. Teams from our Workplace, Real Estate, Global IT, and Procurement organizations work together to provide best-in-class solutions to bring accessibility to all areas of Accenture. They focus on implementing accessibility initiatives in every facet of an employee’s workday, including space, assistive technologies, software, tools, and culture. We provide the needed support and resources to confirm all our people have what they need.

These teams are supporting our people to be their best professionally and personally so that they can seize opportunities and resources to unleash their abilities and successfully manage their careers—and to help themselves, our clients, our communities, and one another.

Tools
We developed an Accommodation Support Tool that enables our people to easily ask for assistive technology, flexible work arrangements, sign language interpreters, screen readers, and more. It is a first-of-its-kind tool in the industry, designed to make the request process easy, private, and personalized. The tool is available in 37 countries, and we plan to expand its availability.

Accessibility Centers
We strive to be innovative and creative in the support of employees across all areas and to bring innovation ideas through our Accessibility Centers. Our Accessibility Centers focus on enablement and advisory services, collaborative technology research, exchange of ideas, recruiting, and showcasing our capabilities related to accessibility to clients, including more than 300 demonstrations to date.

These centers provide space where people can test and use various assistive technologies and ergonomic equipment to make them productive in the Accenture network environment. They demonstrate Accenture’s design leadership and best practices. We currently operate Accessibility Centers in China, India, Japan, Malaysia, two in North America, and three in the Philippines with plans for more locations around the globe.

Technology
Accenture’s global IT organization team is carrying out a program to have all of Accenture people’s interactions with software, devices, and services be compliant with globally defined accessibility standards. The approach is holistic—spanning environmental, technological, and behavioral aspects wherever our people are working to address any permanent, temporary, and situational circumstance. Accenture’s applications are currently at least 75% accessible and have supplemental resources to navigate additional accessibility requirements.

Accenture Labs develop new applications and technologies to meet the needs of people with different abilities. Examples include Drishti, created by Accenture Labs India for the National Association for the Blind, which is enabling people with visual impairments to view their workplace. Dhvani is a multilingual solution that converts speech to text for employees with hearing impairments using real-time captions for any on-screen audio. Yet another solution is Accenture Virtual ExpressLane (AVEL). AVEL offers multi-channel, remote technology support for people with disabilities, including the use of sign language and chat, to provide assistance with software and hardware troubleshooting, user access, and mobile management.

We’re working across the ecosystem, as well, with partners and vendors, to increase accessibility inside and outside Accenture. A key partner relationship is with Microsoft. Accenture runs on Microsoft 365 that includes a wealth of built-in accessibility features. Features include the accessibility checkers in PowerPoint, Word, and Excel; enhanced closed captioning in Teams; and a user preference in Outlook to request or receive accessible emails, to name just a few. Our collaboration with Microsoft involves providing ideas to increase accessibility of Microsoft products, implementing early versions of accessibility features, and sending feedback on the implementations.

Work environments
We bring together experts in real estate, workplace, and technology as well as architectural, project management, and other business partners who specialize in supporting persons with different abilities to create accessible work environments that account for differences in mobility, hearing, vision, and neurodiversity. We provide global design standards to our partners that include accessibility guidelines. These enable design teams to interpret and implement a design strategy that represents Accenture’s ethos and helps improve the way we live and work.

One example of evolving accessibility in our work environments is a current initiative to establish at least one single-user, all-inclusive washroom on every floor of Accenture space where possible. The all-inclusive washrooms will be available to anyone, regardless of gender identity and expression. We’ve aligned on standard global signage and identified opportunities to build all-inclusive washrooms Accenture-wide.

Culture
Accessibility at Accenture is led by our Disability Council, which defines priorities, measures progress, offers support across the different areas of our company, and provides budget oversight for disability inclusion. Accenture’s culture centers on fostering a mindset of inclusivity where accessibility is always considered.

To support this way of thinking, Accenture assesses our hiring practices to confirm we are inclusive, starting with the recruitment process. We have deployed Abilities Unleashed, a disability inclusion leadership development program as well as a suite of online training courses around education and sensitization, Accenture policies, assistive technologies, and flexible work arrangements.

We’ve created a champion network of more than 36,000 disability inclusion champions in 52 countries to collaborate, advance initiatives, and promote allyship. Separately, we include persons with disabilities in all decision making, being mindful that many disabilities are invisible. And we engage with critical stakeholders and perform impact analysis. Periodically, we survey the needs of employees rather than make assumptions. We are passionate about enabling everyone to bring their best selves to work.

Our various Accenture team members participate actively and perform a great deal of visioning and solutioning, making sure initiatives align with the Disability Council priorities.