Examples of Inclusive Design in BT

The following are examples of products and services that have been developed or used within BT that promote the concept of Inclusive Design. That is, the features that make a product usable in the disability market also make it desirable to mainstream audiences and vice-versa.

Phones

Technology

Information

Phones

BT has been developing phones in consultation with disabled people for over 10 years. These phones have been popular with both disabled and non-disabled customers and features of their designs have been used throughout BT's range of phones.

The Big Button phone

The original BT Big Button phone was launched in 1998 and now appears in a number of publications as an example of "Inclusive Design". Since then the phone has been updated a number of times, with the latest version being the Big Button 100.

Features such as the easy-grip handset and larger keys are now used in some of our most popular analogue and digital cordless phones. In many cases the easy-to-use features have appealed to wider audiences and become high street best sellers.

Technology

The Blackberry is a handheld device that gives users wireless access to company websites and email accounts as well as offering a phone line and Internet access from any location. The Blackberry by Research In Motion (RIM) was first used by BT to give senior managers and sales teams the opportunity to manage their e-mails whilst out and about at meetings. The device soon proved invaluable allowing BT people to get more work done within their normal working hours.

BT realised that the product also had benefits for disabled employees. BT engineer Paul Tobin has been profoundly deaf since birth and the Blackberry has transformed his working life. Paul says

"Blackberry has made my job quicker and easier. In the past, I had to rely on texting on my mobile and had to constantly keep getting my laptop out and finding places to log on and to check my jobs. It has greatly improved my working life."

Information

At BT, we understand the need to make information about our services available in a range of formats such as large print and Braille to take into account the needs of our older and disabled customers. In an ideal world we would like to produce our information in one format that can be viewed by all our customers regardless of age or ability and we believe that this website goes some way towards achieving this.

By designing our site to take into account the different access requirements of our customers, we hope that everyone will benefit from a site that is easy to use and understand. For example we have written the site using guidelines from the Plain English campaign. We hope that this makes our site easy to understand for customers who perhaps have a learning difficulty as well as for those who do not use English as a first language including British Sign Language users.

We have also taken into consideration things like screen size to benefit both visually impaired people using technology such as screen readers as well as those viewing websites on laptop screens.

You can find out more about this in our Web Accessibility section.