Design For All feat. Heather Hepburn

We speak with Heather Hepburn, Head of Accessibility at Skyscanner, where she’s spent the past five years embedding inclusive design across one of the world’s leading travel platforms.

In this conversation, she shares her journey into accessibility, practical ways to design more inclusively, and how the Champions of Accessibility Network is helping drive change across the industry.

Could you please introduce yourself, describe your role, and share your experience in accessibility?

Hey, I’m Heather Hepburn, Head of Accessibility at Skyscanner. For those of you who don’t know Skyscanner, we’re an online global travel brand. We find great flights, hotels, and cars for our travellers. We translate our services into 37 different languages. We have over 10 million travellers a month who use us.

I run the accessibility programme and I’ve been doing that for five years. Internally, my responsibilities include creating the accessibility strategy for the business, planning our work and roadmaps, raising awareness and understanding of accessibility and disability inclusion, running our champions network, and building accessibility into our processes. I also advocate for accessibility externally, working with our airline and online travel agent partners, and speaking at various events. I also co-run the Champions of Accessibility Network (CAN) with Gareth Ford Williams and Charlie Turrell.

When I started at Skyscanner, I joined as a content designer. During my interview process, I was asked to do a UX critique of the Skyscanner app, and that’s when I realized how inaccessible it was. I had some knowledge from my previous job at RBS, where we considered accessibility when designing our products, but not loads. I ended up writing a job description for myself to start an accessibility programme at Skyscanner, and that’s how it all started. I’ve learned an awful lot in the last five years!

I think content design is such a common way to get into accessibility because so much of what you do is making things easy to navigate and get to the right information. It lends perfectly to making things accessible for everyone, right?

It really does. One of the biggest things in accessibility is making your content easy to understand. The role of a content designer carries significant accessibility responsibilities. If you’re writing visible content, you should also write any hidden content for screen readers at the same time and in the same tone of voice, so inclusion has always been something I’ve had to consider. The content design team at Skyscanner is now heavily involved in accessibility as well and help keep the rest of the designers in check, which is great.

How important is inclusion to your work?

Super important – it is my work. Every project or conversation I have is about improving accessibility, mainly in our traveller-facing products like our websites and apps. I also speak to our brand marketing teams about making their output accessible. We’re a team of two in a large company, so we have to shout loudly and often. We talk at town halls, other teams’ meetings, and have one-to-one conversations with designers and developers all the time. These range from getting people on board with accessibility to reviewing work and helping make elements or features more accessible.

Skyscanner runs global induction sessions for new staff every two months, which now include an empathy lab where we simulate different disabilities and get participants to carry out simple tasks. Empathy labs can be controversial, as the best way to understand disability is by speaking to someone with lived experience, so we do caveat these sessions very strongly that they are just simulations. However, they are easy to set up and can be repeated, and they start great conversations to get people thinking differently. So many people say things like “I’d never considered how someone might use a phone if they can’t see” and those conversations and considerations are so important to making them think in an inclusive way. It’s a great start for our new staff to then go on to learn how to create accessible products for our travellers, or how to be more inclusive with the way they communicate internally.

How are you promoting inclusive design through your work and what are some challenges?

Our efforts to promote inclusive design begins with training product and content designers and we’re always looking to improve on what training we provide.
In addition to our accessibility training courses, we run hands-on workshops, including screen reader workshops with Adi Latif, an accessibility consultant who uses a screen reader himself. We’re also striving to implement accessibility practices into design processes by default. User testing is important, and we try to get designers to talk to disabled users early and are also trying to promote more co-designing with disabled users.

We also do what we can to ensure accessibility is considered as early as possible in the concept and design process, so we try to make this as easy as possible for our designers. We’ve introduced an accessibility checklist, as well as a semi-automated accessibility annotations tool called Include, which is eBay’s open-source toolkit. On top of this, we have weekly drop-in sessions for designers to ask questions and review their work with us.

There are plenty of challenges to this. Designers have a lot to think about and so we need to make accessibility feel like something they want to do rather than extra work to get buy-in from them. And accessibility is difficult! There are so many elements to it, and while it’s easy to start making positive changes, it’s hard to consider everything and be very good at it. That’s why we’re always looking to upskill and make the improvements we can.

What are two to three tips you’d share with other designers trying to design more inclusively?

• Firstly, think about the visuals. Making sure there’s enough colour contrast between text and the background, and not using colour alone to describe something so we aren’t excluding those who are colour blind. Then layout – using headings, bullet points, left-aligned text and creating white space makes a massive difference for neurodivergent users.
• Secondly, think about content. Use plain English, avoid jargon and acronyms, and explain everything clearly. These can be quick improvements that make a huge difference between a very inaccessible product and something that’s fantastic.
• Thirdly, think about navigation. Consider the software and tools people are using to access your site or product and ensure everyone can navigate it in the way that they want to. They might be using a keyboard with no mouse, a screen reader, or magnification software. Does everything still work in the way it’s meant to?

It’s very, very hard to make things perfect, but considering these three areas will help designers make something great. It’s so much easier to do things right from the start than to fix them later.

Tell us about the Champions of Accessibility Network (CAN) you started and how it can help people in the industry.

I heard Gareth Ford Williams and Charlie Turrell, both ex-BBC, were thinking about starting a champions network, so I got in touch and asked if I could help. We had a steering committee with big names in accessibility which was exciting – I was pinching myself about actually being there! After initial work with them to set the direction, Gareth, Charlie and I got CAN up and running.

It started a couple of years ago as a LinkedIn group. It’s a network for anyone involved in accessibility, with over 2000 members from various sectors, from accessibility specialists, to designers, to developers, and everyone in between. The idea of the group is that it’s a safe space for support and advice, with such a wealth of experience amongst our members to provide guidance. We run monthly online meetups and some face-to-face meetups on topics ranging from accessibility strategy or the European Accessibility Act to setting up your own accessibility champions networks or burnout in the industry.

It’s a very supportive, collaborative group which anyone can join. A great part of the online meetups are the breakout rooms at the end for people to connect – it’s a lovely way to network with others who care about accessibility. So that’s what we’re trying to do – get people together, share all the wins and the struggles, and learn from each other. It’s just such a positive group of people. We absolutely love running it and feel very honoured to do that.

Accessible Design Resources
Following the insightful recommendations from our Design For All participants, we’ve curated an extensive collection of tools, guides, articles, books, blogs, and videos. This resource is specifically designed to support accessibility and inclusion specialists at every stage of their journey.

View Accessible Design Resources