Global Accessibility Awareness Day: Making XM more accessible

This Global Accessibility Awareness Day, learn about what Qualtrics is doing to make experience management more accessible for people with disabilities.

At Qualtrics our DEI vision is to have representation that matches the world around us, but inclusion that exceeds it. Without inclusion, it is a broken human experience. We see Inclusion as more than just the environment that we create for our employees, but how we use our technology to meet every individual where they are. A core part of this is making our product accessible for people with disabilities. 

There are over a billion people in the world with a significant disability - roughly 15% of the population - a group of people who need thoughtfully crafted experiences and accessible tools to fully participate on an equal playing field. As the acceleration of the digital transformation equalizes the playing field in some respects, it is even more important to ensure that digital products and experiences are accessible to all. 

Our Approach to Accessibility

Qualtrics is committed to building products with accessibility at the forefront. To that end, we have incorporated accessibility in all of our product building phases - from user research, to quality assurance to providing a specialized accessibility support team. 

We understand that the secret to unlocking maximum value from an experience management solution lies with people - those who provide the feedback and those who listen for it. Our accessibility-by-design approach ensures that we empower everyone to create and participate in experience programs and address key concerns for our customers and their customers. Qualtrics’ most recent accessibility updates deliver the following value to our customers: 

Expanding Reach
We empower companies to listen to all voices in an equitable and an inclusive manner. This helps customers and employees feel truly heard to increase loyalty, retention and brand equity. With nearly 1B people with a disability worldwide, it is imperative that companies have the ability to hear this feedback to generate the most complete and representative insights, leading to more inclusive and personalized experiences for their customers.

Building and Supporting a Diverse Workforce
Our platform accessibility functionality empowers all employees to contribute equally. This promotes inclusive hiring. Increasingly, organizations make inclusive hiring a priority and recognize that doing so not only promotes a culture of equal participation and empowerment, but leads to better business results. In fact, according to a report by Accenture, companies that champion disability employment and inclusion achieved an average of 28% higher revenue and doubled net income over a four year period. 

Ensure Compliance
We provide an Enterprise and public sector compliant platform that aligns with internationally recognized standards, Web Content Accessibility Standards (WCAG). The Department of Justice (DOJ) has stated its stance that ADA compliance requires web accessibility and has taken action against a number of organizations and in all of those cases compliance to Web Content Accessibility Guidelines  (WCAG) 2.0 has been mandated. 

When it comes to accessibility for our employees, we partner with our employee resource group, Q&Able to create an environment of inclusion for our employees with disabilities and provide insights into our processes, facilities and products. Most recently, we have published a handbook on disabilities to provide employees and managers with guidance on accommodations for various types of disability.   

Recent accessibility updates 

To date, we have delivered a number of critical accessibility enhancements. We strategically prioritized updates that would make the most used surfaces of our platform compliant with relevant guidelines, such as WCAG, and regional laws.

Key among the updates was  a redesigned survey taking experience, featuring simple layout design that is easy to use, mobile friendly, delivers accessibility for 95% of user interactions andis certified with a VPAT as WCAG 2.1 AA. This update greatly elevates the ability of all people to provide feedback to experience programs. Website / app feedback experience is now also WCAG 2.1 AA compliant. 

While survey taking has addressed the needs of feedback providers, it’s also critical the experience is accessible for program owners. To that end, we have delivered a number of enhancements, all certified with a VPAT as WCAG 2.0 compliant, for  end to end experience management: 

• Fully redesigned Home and Projects page 
• Redesigned catalog experience 
• Redesigned Results dashboard and core widgets
• Data and Analysis tab
• Accessible survey builder 
• Dashboards (coming July 2022)

These updates are just the beginning of our journey and commitment to accessibility as we continue to innovate and expand the accessibility of our platform. For the next enhancement push we are planning a series of updates around key analytics and actioning functionality in our EX, CX and CoreXM product lines.

Every new innovation will be accessible by design and we will continuously monitor for developments in emerging standards, such as WCAG 2.2 and WCAG 3.0, so as to make appropriate enhancements and updates when they are ratified. For the latest updates on VPATs, please refer to our Commitment to Accessibility webpage. If you’d like to learn more about our accessibility roadmap please reach out to your representative.