Accessibility
Delivering innovation for an accessible future.
Accessibility is about identifying and removing barriers that exclude anyone, including people with disabilities. This is important as over 1 billion people globally have some form of disability or impairment. At Sony, we strive to leverage creativity and technology to enhance the accessibility of our products, services, and experiences for everyone to use and enjoy.
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Working With, Not Just For
There is a maxim in accessibility “Nothing about us, without us” which means we should create products, services, and experiences with people with disabilities as well as for people with disabilities.
We work with people with disabilities and organisations representing people with disabilities across Europe to improve our products, services and experiences.
These partnerships include working with organisations such as the Royal National Institute of Blind People (RNIB) and AbilityNet in the United Kingdom, ONCE in Spain and Open Style Lab in the United States on initiatives to make our products, services and experiences more inclusive for people with disabilities.
Sony has partnered with Be My Eyes to make consumer electronics more accessible for blind and low vision people through specialised help in 7 countries across Europe.
Additionally, we sponsor and participate at accessibility-related events and community gatherings. This includes sponsoring and partnering with AbilityNet’s annual TechShare Pro, Europe’s largest event for accessibility and inclusive design.
Adhering to Standards and Regulations
We are leading efforts in ensuring our products and services meet European standards for accessibility.
Within this work, Sony Europe plays an active role as a member of the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) in updating the technical standard for the European Accessibility Act, EN301549 Accessibility requirements for ICT products and services.
Awareness and Understanding
We run a variety of initiatives to promote and raise awareness of accessibility and disability amongst our colleagues to help drive our efforts.
These include running our Inclusive Design Education and Accessibility (IDEA) Lab events to raise awareness of disability and the importance of implementing accessibility and inclusive design practices into our consumer products and our workspaces. So far, events have been held across Europe engaging over 700 colleagues and has sparked conversations, personal stories, and actions amongst colleagues.
We also observe accessibility and disability awareness days including Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD) and International Day of Persons with Disabilities and hold activities amongst colleagues to coincide.
Our employee resource group, Accessibility Champions Network, is a staff-run employee group to connect people and share ways to implement and promote accessibility and inclusive design initiatives at Sony.
Benchmarking Ourselves
We want to embed accessibility and inclusive design across our technology, entertainment, content, workplace environment, product packaging, customer support and much more.
One of the ways we do this is through assessing the level of accessibility and disability inclusion. This includes assessments we conduct using Disability:IN’s accessibility assessment toolkit. By taking this approach, we are proud to have been recognised as a Best Place to Work for Disability Inclusion in the UK and Germany and as a Disability Confident Employer in the UK.
For further information regarding Sony’s approach to accessibility and information related to specific products and features, please visit our global Accessibility site.