Eureka moments: Telstra's 5 year expedition for a more digitally inclusive future for all.

By Ben Pintos-Oliver, Head of Digital Systems & Accessibility at Telstra.

In May, it will be five years since I arrived to head up the Accessibility team at Telstra. Five years of towering challenges, hard-fought wins, and extraordinary people who let nothing stand in their way. Every day, I’ve been surrounded by extraordinary people. They’ve helped me find my life’s calling.

The first was Sean Murphy, Telstra’s first Accessibility Specialist hire, who is blind but can see through any challenge you care to put in front of him. Before interviewing Sean, I fretted for hours how I was going to greet him. How would I shake his hand? I called my father-in-law, who’s coached dozens of disabled athletes. “Just ask him if you can shake his hand,” he said.

My interview with Sean ran twice as long as either of us had planned. I made a lifelong friend that day.

And I learned the most valuable lesson of my new vocation: just ask. To test our new apps and webpages for different audiences, we set up a user testing program that’s driven by people with various disabilities working alongside our coders and designers. We developed a training program that’s reached hundreds of Telstra staff with tips, tools, and the sheer power of accessible design. And we developed an Inclusive Tech Lab, which has generated a business-wide buzz through simulations showcasing the amazing capabilities of the latest accessible tech.

The secret of all these things? They’re delivered by the people who understand disability best – the people who live with blindness, deafness, mobility or neurological impairments. 

Finding ability

When we began working on Telstra.com.au, it felt like an unscalable mountain. There were thousands of pages of content, all continually changing. It was clear that we needed a few more people, and Telstra’s executives agreed. We started working on findability, the search functions so critical to accessible navigation. We slowly grew the team, which today numbers 16 people – nearly half of whom live with disability.

When we started developing the MyTelstra app in 2020, it gave us the opportunity to “get in on the ground floor” – to incorporate accessibility from the outset of the product lifecycle. This has been another critical lesson: including accessibility from the start not only saves countless hours, it can be 3-30 times cheaper than ‘retrofitting’ inaccessible products.

These eureka moments are another reason I love my job. I’ll never forget those early days of MyTelstra, Sean and me and 10 developers huddled around a phone, listening to the VoiceOver feature that reads out what is one the screen. This ‘on-the-fly’ testing became a regular occurence. If the voiceover didn’t work, there’d be a huge groan and everyone would trudge back to their desks to rework the code. When it worked, a great cheer would go up – disturbing everyone on the office floor!

A truly diverse team

From those first huddles, a great camaraderie built up between our team and the designers, coders and content creators who work the real magic in all tech workplaces. Today, with our larger team, there’s even more camaraderie, and it’s even more special for involving people with the varied skills and interests and lifestyles that only a truly diverse team can deliver.

When Telstra’s neurodiverse recruitment program began, we were the first to put our hands up for a new hire. I had to change my hyperactive communication style, learn how to slow down; but having neurodiverse members has opened up so many avenues of possibility for us, so many unique ways of working. Genius is often well-hidden.

Fixing an accessibility defect has always been considered a ‘nice to have’, something that comes second to functional defects. But the fact is, an accessibility defect is a functional defect, because part of your audience will always be missing. At Telstra we’ve changed our process to give accessibility defects the same profile and urgency as functional defects. This has been our real eureka moment and may be one of the key reasons it was named Corporate Website of the Year in the 2023 Australian Access Awards!

We know there’s still a long way to go, but we’re extremely excited about the power of technology to break down barriers, which will long motivate us to continue pushing for a more inclusive future for all.