AXSChat with Gareth Ford Williams
Channel: AXSChat
Date: 2018-11-16

In 2005 Gareth joined the bbc.co.uk management team and founded the BBC’s Digital Accessibility Team. This team was tasked with ensuring all future services delivered by IP would be fully accessible and the service that would later become known as BBC iPlayer would lead by example. The delivery of broadcast style access services in an on-demand environment was and still is a core objective of the iPlayer.

Over the course of the next 3 years the Accessibility Team worked as an integral part of iPlayer’s core Product Team which ensured BBC iPlayer V1.0 launched as an accessible product (WCAG V1.0) and access services were there at launch (subtitles and signing) or within the first 12 months (Audio Description), which ensured the iPlayer was the first fully accessible VOD service in the world.
In 2008 Gareth was tasked by the BBC Trust to design an IPTV accessibility ecosystem for a connected TV platform. This work informed the BBC Trust’s accessibility requirements for YouView. He then acted as YouView’s Product Manager for Accessibility for the next 2 years.
In 2011 he returned to the BBC Future Media’s User Experience and Design Team to head-up both the Usability Research and Accessibility teams. One of the outcomes of
these teams’ work ensured that the BBC’s 2012 Olympic services delivered by IP were the most accessible yet.

In 2013 he established a new direction for the Accessibility team, which he now manages full time. The new team authored The BBC’s first Mobile Accessibility Standards and Techniques Library which were first published this February 2014 and updated in 2017 and they support a network of over 180 Accessibility Champions across the digital teams.

In 2018 Gareth’s role changed and he is now Head of User Experience. This role includes the management of both the internal and external accessibility teams and a programme of work to evolve the BBC’s guidelines into a more fundamental part of its design and engineering framework.