1. What is involved in the Access and Inclusion Index (the Index)?
- The Index contains 82 questions that cover 9 Key Areas of the business. Each question has 4 options depending on your level of maturity.
- You will need to provide evidence to support your answers.
- You will likely need to engage multiple representatives from across the business.
2. How much information do we need to provide?
You need to provide enough evidence to support your chosen answer to each question. This might be multiple documents, or it could be just one. Evidence can be extracts/copies of policies, guidelines or checklists; internal and external webpages; copies of communications, meeting agendas or project plans; or other documentation that shows our team how you meet the answer you have selected.
You are also able to add an explanation in the free text box to explain the documents or provide additional context.
Make sure to read the question and your selected answer carefully. Evidence should support all aspects of the question and answer, or your score may be affected.
3. What is relevant evidence?
- Documents should be in an accessible format (Word documents, tagged pdfs, and image descriptions/alt text for images). Your score may be impacted if the evidence isn’t accessible.
- Links need to be publicly available. Australian Disability Network is not able to access internal links to intranets, Sharepoint documents or other internal content.
- Evidence needs to be from a period of 1 October the previous year – the submission date.
- Evidence should capture all aspects of the question. Our team will not cross-check with previous submissions or other Australian Disability Network work in our scoring process.
- Please ensure you clearly indicate with page numbers what part of an uploaded document is relevant to your answer, or upload extracts rather than entire documents.
- Make sure the evidence is relevant to the question you are responding to! Extra or unnecessary evidence can make it difficult for our team to score accurately.
4. What if we don’t have any evidence for a question?
If you aren’t able to provide evidence for a question you will be scored as Not Participating for that question.
5. How does the scoring work?
The Access and Inclusion Index team at the Australian Disability Network will review your self-assessed scores based on the evidence you have provided. We have two scorers review independently, who will then compare their scores to make sure they are accurate.
Once the scoring is complete, we will provide you with your organisation’s individual and benchmarked data, as well as a report if you have selected this option.
6. What is the deadline for submissions?
Submissions for the Access and Inclusion Index 2024 will open on Tuesday 2nd April. The deadline for 2024 benchmarking is Friday 6th December.
7. When can we expect our report?
Submissions received prior to 30th September 2024 will receive final report within an eight-week turnaround. Benchmarking information will be provided when finalised in March 2025.
Submissions received 1 October – 6th December 2024 will receive reports, including benchmarking information, in March 2025.
8. What is a good Access and Inclusion Index score?
Although you will receive an overall score, this is just one part of the Index process! The impact comes from the process of bringing together multiple business areas to discuss and reflect on accessibility and inclusion practices, and from implementing the recommendations made in the Index reports.
First time participants score an average of 12%.
9. How long should we allow to complete the Access and Inclusion Index?
This can vary between organisations. We suggest allowing at least a month to collate and finalise evidence, and to begin planning your submission 3 months prior to allow enough time to gain relevant approvals and brief contributors. Large organisations with a lot of business functions and evidence may like to consider allowing 3-6 months total.