In today's digital age, accessibility isn’t just a buzzword. Accessibility is a fundamental driver for ensuring equal opportunities for all. When we say we're making Ben more accessible, we're not just talking about tweaks and adjustments; we're talking about our commitment to inclusivity and equality.
Let’s explore what this means and some of the changes we’re making to make Ben more accessible for employees and admins.
What do we mean by accessible?
Accessibility goes beyond usability. It's about ensuring that our product and services can be easily understood, reached, and entered by users with diverse abilities. This includes making our platform screen-reader friendly, creating appropriate colour contrasts, using easily readable fonts, and much more.
Addressing this means we're creating an environment where everyone can engage with our technology seamlessly.
Here’s why accessibility is important to Ben…
There are a bunch of reasons why we’re making Ben more accessible, but here are the top reasons.
Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging: Making Ben more accessible means that everyone, regardless of their abilities, can access and use our product and services. It promotes inclusivity by breaking down barriers and allowing everyone to get the most out of Ben and their benefits!
Compliance: Meeting accessibility standards isn't just about legal requirements, it's about doing what's right. Many countries have laws and regulations around accessibility in technology, and we're committed to meeting standards like the WCAG 2.1 to create the highest level of inclusivity that we can.
Social Responsibility: Prioritising accessibility aligns with our Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) goals. Making Ben accessible to all helps drive forward our commitment to being a socially responsible company.
User Experience (UX): Accessible design principles not only benefit our users with disabilities but also enhance the overall user experience for everyone. Having clear navigation, concise content, and intuitive interfaces means Ben will be more user-friendly and enjoyable for all our users—something we’ve always been passionate about.
What changes are we making exactly?
We're introducing a series of changes across the employer admin portal in the Ben platform and the employee portal to enhance the accessibility of the platform for everyone.
Here's a glimpse of this will mean for Ben users:
Visual Design Changes:
We're revamping the visual elements of our platform to ensure better readability, clarity, and usability for all users.
Log into your Ben portal and look out for:
- Darker text to assist users with visual impairments.
- Interactive elements (e.g. check boxes & input boxes) will have darker outlines.
- Users can now increase the text size on their browser up to 200%.
- New carousel on the homepage.
- Updated icons to indicate actions and external links.
We’re also making some other small but mighty tweaks which will make navigating Ben much simpler for all users e.g.
- Improvements to the search bar — we’ll now inform users via a text hint that their input will filter the content below.
- We’ve made keyboard navigation more robust — users will now see a focus state that shows where their tab selector is.
Code Changes:
Behind the scenes, we're making a bunch of code level adjustments to help us meet the WCAG 2.1 recommendations for accessibility.
Here are some of the changes we’re making…
- Enabling keyboard accessibility
- Improving screen-reader accessibility
- Making non-text content updates
Many people rely on assistive technologies like screen readers to navigate websites. Similarly, many people are unable to or prefer not to use a mouse when navigating websites. This is why making Ben accessible via keyboard navigation and assistive technologies is super important. These seemingly small code changes will have a huge impact on the accessibility of Ben to everyone!
When will these changes be live?
We’re working on improving accessibility across the entire Ben platform in stages, on an ongoing basis over time, so some areas of the platform may not be fully accessible just yet, while others already are.
So, where exactly have we already made changes?
Employee Portal
- Home screen
- Benefits
Company Admin Portal
- People
- Benefits
- Enrollments
Want to learn more about accessibility?
Check out this brief 2-minute video explaining the changes we're making and why accessibility matters to us.