People: communication

Good communication is essential to ensure your project runs smoothly and has the best chance of success. Taking the time to research accessible formats to match the communication requirements of the team will enable regular meetings and sharing of information to take place with fewer obstacles.

Including review points to check on how the individual team members are progressing (as well as how well their tasks are progressing) can be a useful way of managing issues that often lie beneath the surface. Such issues can cause problems if left unattended or ignored.

Giving people the opportunity to ask for support, extra time, clarification, or alternative working methods can add to the creative dynamic which drives the team and gels you together.

When recruiting your team, asking how people usually manage their time, deadlines and pressure can be as useful as checking on access needs. This is because not everyone may be aware of the demands of the project at the beginning, and so may not feel a need to disclose certain things that are useful to know.

Usually, people will have preferences about the way they have been managing their support needs in the past, and this insight can be valuable because it gives you an idea of what choices are available to ensure good team working. 

At a time when many people are using remote conferencing for meetings, it will also be important to use accessible tech tools.

Zoom is a well known platform that is free to use for limited time sessions. Recordings can be made for those who prefer to recap or can't attend with the rest of the team and need to catch up later.  You can add captions through services such as Otter.Ai and change the viewing set up to make it easier to view access support workers such as BSL interpreters.

The more features you use, the more likely it is that you have to pay for the service, so do factor this into your access budget.