Spotlight on: Hassell Inclusion

Treating accessibility as an audit problem is expensive and unsustainable

Most organisations treat digital accessibility as an audit problem: test, fix, repeat.

The result is a cycle where compliance is achieved briefly and then degrades until the next audit or legal challenge. At scale, this is expensive and unsustainable.

Hassell Inclusion takes a different approach. The UK-based accessibility agency works with organisations including HSBC, ServiceNow, IKEA, and Santander to embed accessibility in their business-as-usual processes and team capability, so they can continually deliver accessibility quality and win awards for it.

The agency trains over 1,000 professionals a year from 140+ companies across 50+ countries. HSBC sponsors free training places with 100 spaces per course, open to any organisation.

The agency was founded by Jonathan Hassell, who wrote BS 8878 and ISO 30071-1, the British and international Standards that provide a blueprint for how organisations should embed accessibility into their processes to assure products delivered are always accessible, in an cost-efficient way. These are the Accessibility Maturity frameworks procurement teams and industry regulators reference when assessing whether an organisation is really “good at accessibility”.

Hassell Inclusion provide many free resources for the international accessibility community, including the Digital Accessibility Maturity Scorecard (given a Zero Project Award in 2022) and, since 2020, has provided free monthly accessibility webinars, helping over 26,500 registrations from across 87 countries.

In early 2026 the company launched HiBot, a free AI Accessibility Maturity Assistant trained on insights from the webinar archive. Early feedback from a UK public sector organisation found it more reliable than both Microsoft Copilot and Google Search for accessibility queries.

Hassell Inclusion has helped clients win over 40 accessibility awards in the past few years, each serving as internal ROI evidence that expands and protects programme funding at board level.

Hassell Inclusion’s webinars are a finalist in the Outstanding Digital Inclusion Project category at the Digital Technology Leaders Awards 2026.