“It Tells Us Where To Start” – Scotiabank’s Head of Accessibility on Regulation, Vendors and Banking While Blind

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Ask most people whether accessibility regulation helps or hinders and you get an argument about red tape. Scotiabank’s Head of Accessibility has a different answer: the law told her where to start.

Monica Ackermann spoke to Double Tap at the Zero Project conference in Vienna. Her job, she explained, is to develop an overarching accessibility strategy for the bank, work that began in Scotiabank’s digital organisation by embedding accessibility into software design practices and spread outwards from there.

Regulation as a framework, not a stick

Ackermann named the two pieces of law that shape her work: the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act, and the Accessible Canada Act, which applies to Scotiabank as a federally regulated banking organisation.

“Those laws help to create a bit of a framework around which we can then focus our priority work around accessibility,” she said.

Steven Scott put it to her that many organisations see regulation as the stick rather than the carrot. Ackermann’s reframing was the opposite.

“When we have that sort of foundation to work with, whether it’s a standard, what you can do is you can take that and take a look at your own business and say, how does that align with our business? How might we innovate in this space?” she said. “The accessibility regulations and the standards, the way that I look at them, provide that ground framework of where do we start?”

Leaning on vendors, and why that helps everyone

On the employee side, Scotiabank works with HR on a hub-and-spoke model covering the whole arc of employment — whether the careers website is accessible, whether recruitment and onboarding work, and then the harder problem of the software people use once they arrive.

Most of that software is bought in. So the team goes to the vendors and asks how an enterprise application can be made to work with JAWS, ZoomText or Fusion.

That pressure does not stop at Scotiabank’s door. “In Canada, we have a wonderful group where the accessibility teams from a lot of the major banks come together,” Ackermann said. “We have conversations with our vendors and say, it’s not just one bank, it’s multiple banks. It’s many of your customers that are requesting some of the same things.”

Her conclusion: “Accessibility is one of those spaces where people collaborate. We’re all working towards the same thing.”

The problem you cannot test before you commit

Steven raised the difficulty every blind customer knows: you cannot try a banking app before opening an account. You sign up, go through the whole process, and find out at the end — unless someone in the community has already told you.

Ackermann did not dispute the picture. Scotiabank’s banking applications, she said, are designed to the WCAG standards, with regular user research involving disabled people.

The part she returned to was who is doing the work. “When it comes to nothing about us without us, the members of the accessibility team have a wide range of disabilities, including vision loss,” she said. “As leaders in accessibility themselves, there is that pride of ownership and that desire to ensure that anything that we are putting out, we can use ourselves.”

Come to Work

Scotiabank announced a renewed partnership with CNIB in the December before the interview, working closely on the Come to Work employment programme.

Ackermann’s wider view came from earlier work with Disability Rights Promotion International on employment in Bangladesh, India and Nepal. What she valued about Vienna was hearing from countries at very different stages.

“It’s not always the global north that has the answers,” she said. “There are many, many learnings that can be shared through all of our countries in order to leapfrog and actually really achieve equity.”

Resources

• CNIB Come to Work: cnib.ca
• Zero Project: zeroproject.org