Audit services

What is an audit project?

1. Assessing a recruitment pipeline to understand and remove barriers to access for disabled talent. 
2. Implementing our built environment framework to understand where office, retail and or production spaces reach local and global design standards. In addition, mapping opportunities for moving beyond compliance in physical, digital and sensory environments. 
3. Reviewing brand marketing guidelines to ensure that they meet the standards of the European Accessibility Act Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. 
4. Centring the lived experiences of disabled people to measure the accessibility of websites, apps and digital infrastructure.
5. Examining the accessibility of internal and external events, conferences, pop ups and marketing activations, from invitation to evaluation.

Our methodology for audits

The exact breakdown may differ depending on the specific service area, but they will often resemble the following structure.

1. Stakeholder engagement

This is often our first touchpoint to the wider organisation, and it is critical in supporting our understanding of the success and challenges within the organisation. We facilitate individual and  intimate conversations, rooted in psychological safety, with key members of the company, government department, cultural institution, and/or non-profit. We deliberately engage those who sit inside and outside relevant employee resource groups, those who are in middle management and senior leadership, and we extend invitations to people who may have interest or perhaps lived experiences in sharing their insights with us. 

As an external partner, one that is disability-led, and whose practice is rooted in creating such sessions to be accessible by design, these conversations foster transparency, and great depth of understanding. Together we begin to ideate on the gaps and solutions that would support and accelerate the organisation’s strategic objectives in accessibility.

From a change management lens, this engagement supports a sense of ownership over the strategy and ensures that the work is sustained, and continues beyond the lifespan of the partnership with Tilting the Lens.

2. Diagnostic and reporting

This is followed by an in-depth review of the necessary policies, software, physical spaces and/or organisational data sets. We map and benchmark the organisation’s positioning, and compare this to the strategic objectives, or specific project goals.

We then analyse the current positioning to insights and recommendations that are shaped by the stakeholders, our global practice, and the lived experiences of disabled people, to ensure that the next steps are actionable, measurable, and implementable in the short and long-term.

At Tilting the Lens, our process in developing insights and recommendations is underlined by three key principles. 

Beyond compliance

As a majority-disabled team, our lived experiences have been shaped by the notion that to be compliant is to be accessible. But, whether it is within the built environment, HR policies, or digital accessibility, compliance is local, not global. It sets out a minimum set of standards that continues to exclude many people – both customers and employees. 

Structuring ambitions based solely in compliance, limits the possibility to implement accessibility as an opportunity for innovation. It continues a culture that we are only engaging in this work because we must. Instead we can recognise it aligns with our ambitions to ideate, scale, expand our business goals and hire the best talent.

While some wish to begin their partnership with us wanting to understand where they are in terms of local or national compliance, we view this benchmark as the starting point. Our reports and documentation clearly identify how our recommendations and implementation plans align to local and global standards, but equally present the opportunities to expand beyond.

Designing with disabled people

Building on ‘beyond compliance’, the opportunity to include lived experiences to ideate solutions is essential to our practice. For example, if you are undertaking a project to understand why the navigation on your website is failing WCAG standards, the expert is a user of assistive technology. Or, if your organisation has a robust reasonable adjustments policy, but disabled colleagues are not engaging with line managers or HR to request accommodations, the disabled people within your company will have expert insight into not merely why this is occurring, but key recommendations for change.

At the beginning of every project, we deliberately engage with the disabled people in your organisation – either through an open call and one-on-one conversations, or by meeting with your Employee Resource Group (ERG) and executive sponsors – to understand how change happens within your company culture, and to leverage their insights and solutions for a more accessible organisation. 

On our Research Services page, you can learn more about how we implement co-design research practices, and fulfill our mission of making a measurable, economic difference to global disabled communities.

Continuous progress over perfection

Within this work, there is often the belief that solutions can and should be ‘fully accessible’. We push back against this assumption, because to design a solution that works for everyone sets us up to fail. Instead, we deliberately design solutions to be flexible, equitable, and multi-modal so that people have agency, clarity and can adapt products, services and policies for their specific requirements.

Instead, we practice a methodology of constant iteration and progress. Within our audits, we know that there is no ideal or perfect solution that will work for everyone. We work with our clients to implement actions to continuously reduce friction and feelings of exclusion.

3. Measurement and implementation

At Tilting the Lens, accessibility is a lever that maps to an organisation’s business and strategic objectives. It is not an act of charity or something that is merely nice to do. It’s essential that at the beginning of an audit, we design the project to meet specific goals, objectives and measurable outcomes. For example, we wish for our new company headquarters to be more accessible to ensure that we can accelerate our recruitment of disabled talent. Or, we are auditing our reasonable adjustment process to increase the psychological safety of our workforce (and will measure this in an Employee Listening Survey). Or, we want to increase the number of customers that use assistive technology to engage with our website. 

We set these objectives, to ensure that accessibility is embedded into business as usual and team behaviours. Depending on the scale of our client engagement, some projects eclipse the Diagnostic and Reporting phase, with clients equipped to implement the recommendations, and a check-in is scheduled three months later for review, feedback and adjustment.

For others, we have been fortunate to support them in executing their implementation plan, being a strategic partner in the roll-out of the short-term and long-term recommendations, and supporting them to access necessary data, report progress and remaining barriers to leadership, and communicate any and all advancements externally.

Learn more about our approach