Accessibility Specialist / Champions Network Manager

Job Band

Job Reference: SF21273

Band: D

Salary: £60,000 - £70,000 depending on relevant skills, knowledge and experience. The expected salary range for this role reflects internal benchmarking and external market insights.

Contract type: Permanent

Location: Office Base can be London, Cardiff, Salford, Newcastle or Glasgow. This is a hybrid role and the successful candidate will balance office working with home working.

Advert closing date is 23/03/2025.

We’re happy to discuss flexible working. Please indicate your choice under the flexible working question in the application. There is no obligation to raise this at the application stage but if you wish to do so, you are welcome to. Flexible working will be part of the discussion at offer stage.

Excellent career progression– the BBC offers great opportunities for employees to seek new challenges and work in different areas of the organisation.

Unrivalled training and development opportunities – our in-house Academy hosts a wide range of internal and external courses and certification.

Benefits - We offer a negotiable salary package, a flexible 35-hour working week for work-life balance and 25 days annual leave with the option to buy an extra 5 days, a defined pension scheme and discounted dental, health care and gym. You can find out more about working at the BBC by selecting this link to our candidate pack.

If you need to discuss adjustments or access requirements for the interview process please contact the [email protected].  For any general queries, please contact: [email protected].

SDD24

Job Purpose

Are you passionate about making digital experiences accessible to everyone? Do you have a knack for leading and inspiring others? The BBC is for everyone, and as such, ensuring all BBC digital products and services are accessible to all its audiences is of paramount importance.

We are looking for a dedicated Senior Accessibility Professional to join our team as an Accessibility Specialist and Accessibility Champions Network manager. In this unique role, you will split your time equally between consulting BBC audience-facing product teams on digital accessibility and managing a network of accessibility champions within the BBC.

Main Responsibilities

Managing the BBC accessibility champion network:

• Alongside a small central accessibility team, recruiting and supporting a larger group of accessibility champions is a vital part of the culture shift needed to embed accessible and inclusive product development. These accessibility champions are integral to helping embed accessibility into our BBC product group activities and culture. The Accessibility Champions Network is a growing network of user researchers, designers, engineers, testers, and other disciplines.
• This part of the role involves continuous contact with network members to support and grow the network through on-boarding, providing accessibility advice, signposting to training and resources, and facilitating knowledge sharing and meet-ups.
• An annual champion network calendar will be part of the management of this community and will include things like monthly engagement events, organising speaker sessions, sharing conference attendance opportunities, encouraging show and tells, etc.

Supporting on smaller accessibility initiatives:

• Providing consulting, coaching, and support to cross-functional product teams, advising them on preventing and resolving accessibility issues.
• Providing accessibility consulting support to third party suppliers working for the BBC (e.g.: suppliers that might provide games, quizzes, host audience-facing sites, etc.)

Are you the right candidate?

To be successful in this role, you will need to have:

• Extensive knowledge of digital accessibility and inclusion.
• In depth knowledge of accessibility guidelines and best practices.
• Working knowledge of digital technologies (e.g., HTML, CSS, JavaScript, iOS, Android).
• In depth knowledge of design and evaluation tools for accessibility (e.g., Colour Contrast Analyser, Figma design tools, Axe, Developer Tools, Accessibility Inspect
• In depth knowledge of desktop and mobile assistive technologies (e.g., JAWS, NVDA, VoiceOver, TalkBack, Dragon Naturally Speaking, ZoomText).
• Ability to work well and communicate effectively with people from different disciplines with varying degrees of technical accessibility experience.
• Excellent organisational, interpersonal, and communication skills and the ability to advocate for accessibility and inclusion.
• Experience of managing a network, community of practice, guild, or similar.
• Ability to inspire and guide a network of accessibility champions and passion for promoting accessibility and driving organisational change.

Interview Process

Interviews will be held week commencing 7th April. They will held virtually, one stage, and be mixture of BBC Values and Technical Questions.

About the BBC

The BBC is committed to redeploying employees seeking suitable alternative employment within the BBC for different reasons and they will be given priority consideration ahead of other applicants. Priority consideration means for those employees seeking redeployment their application will be considered alongside anyone else at risk of redundancy, prior to any individuals being considered who are not at risk.

We don’t focus simply on what we do – we also care how we do it. Our values and the way we behave are important to us. Please make sure you’ve read about our values and behaviours here.

Diversity matters at the BBC. We have a working environment where we value and respect every individual's unique contribution, enabling all of our employees to thrive and achieve their full potential.

We want to attract the broadest range of talented people to be part of the BBC – whether that’s to contribute to our programming or our wide range of non-production roles. The more diverse our workforce, the better able we are to respond to and reflect our audiences in all their diversity.

We are committed to equality of opportunity and welcome applications from individuals, regardless of age, gender, ethnicity, disability, sexual orientation, gender identity, socio-economic background, religion and/or belief. We will consider flexible working requests for all roles, unless operational requirements prevent otherwise.

To find out more about Diversity and Inclusion at the BBC, please click here.