Building with accessibility front of mind

Our responsibility as a large employer is to create opportunities for everyone in our community, not just for some.

We are creating a new era of digital products and services to significantly improve the banking experience for everyone. Accessibility and inclusive design are central to this evolution.

Advances in technology are affording greater potential for creating accessible services for customers with accessibility and inclusion needs. We have made some great progress recently on this front, especially in the build and rollout of our new retail banking platform ANZ Plus.

Our new commitments are set out in the ANZ Accessibility and Inclusion Plan which demonstrates how we are working to embed accessibility into our digital future.

Not just good for business

In his speech at the National Job Summit in September 2022, Australian of the Year Dylan Alcott highlighted the lack of progress in workforce participation for people with a disability. “In my whole life, it hasn’t changed,” he said.

This is despite growing evidence that diverse workforces outperform the market.

In Australia, around 18 per cent of the population (about 4.4 million people) have a disability, according to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare. That’s a significant number of people whose lives are affected by disability - and many of them are our customers and employees.

To design a product or solution for everyone, we need to understand and care about different needs. In fact, by considering the needs of everyone, innovations can emerge which offer more inclusive products and services to benefit the whole community.

Listening and learning

ANZ Plus builds upon our longstanding focus across the bank on improving accessibility. The team working on ANZ Plus has embedded this in their inclusive design approach.

A diverse range of people with lived experience of disability have been involved in user testing - neurodiverse people, people with cerebral palsy or hearing impairments and many others.

In conjunction with Intopia Digital, people with disability provided feedback on the ANZ Plus app during its development stage. The testing sessions were livestreamed to the design team who saw how people completed core banking tasks such as payments or scanning an identification document.

ANZ has also implemented an inclusive design assessment in the product lifecycle. This is an important first step as it ensures product engineering always considers relevant accessibility guidelines.

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Building best practice

While we have accessible features in all our digital channels to some degree, ANZ Plus has been built with additional functionally in Apple’s iOS App. Android is coming soon.

Switch and Voice Control are two key accessibility functions on the iPhone and these have been enhanced for customers using ANZ Plus.

Voice Control allows customers with low dexterity to use their voice to interact with the ANZ Plus App. They can simply say “tap payments” to view their payments without having to use their hands.

Voice Control is a way to tell the phone to tap, swipe, scroll and interact as if someone was doing so with their hands. The user tells the phone to do a gesture or action on an element on screen, for example a “payments” button.  This could also be used by customers on the go, say while jogging on a treadmill.

Switch Control is an accessibility feature that allows users with limited mobility to control their entire iPhone via ability switches and other adaptive devices for mobility impairments. On the ANZ Plus App, we have simplified the experience to greatly reduce the number of switch interactions required to complete everyday banking tasks.

By utilising inclusive design principles, we ensure as many people as possible can use our products, services and working environments with dignity, convenience and independence.

Gerard Florian: Group Executive, Technology and Executive Sponsor for Accessibility