About Us
The All Able ethos: helping you help everyone
At All Able, we are committed to using our expertise to deliver accessible and inclusive services that work for everyone.
We have supported a wide variety of organisations including banks, law enforcement and government of all levels, through to paint companies, marketing agencies and music notation apps. We are confident that our many years experience can help you to build better and more accessible services, whatever the situation.
We are a small team of experts who care deeply about the work we do and the level of support we offer to our customers. Whether it is technical auditing, training on anything accessibility related, or deep dive research into delivering better services for disabled users, we are here to help.
With a background in public services and education, we believe that everyone should have equal opportunity to utilise public service, get an education, and engage with their communities to live an enjoyable and independent life. For people to have these opportunities, we believe that public services must change to offer equality and equal access through their services.
Over the last decade and more, public services have moved to digital platforms, and with the impact of Covid-19 this move to remote working and digital interaction has been accelerated. Sadly through poor transition and implementation, the move to online services has alienated significant portions of the UK population.
Poorly designed websites have disproportionately affected disabled users as the websites do not support assistive technology, and also affected those who have low digital skills, effectively blocking them from access to services. The overlap of these affected groups are those who statistically have most need of support from public services, meaning that those that most need help often can't get it easily.
Together the All Able team have worked with nearly every area of the public sector and know the challenges of delivering effective services during times of austerity. Our specialist knowledge in the delivery of accessibility will help public sector organisations build services that remove barriers for staff and citizens to provide work and community environments that accept everyone, regardless of ability or disablement.
Meet the team
George Rhodes: Director
George is an experienced digital accessibility specialist, having worked in a wide variety of industries including; central and local governments, education, NHS, law enforcement and a wide variety of private businesses.
For several years George's focus has been on the delivery of accessible and inclusive services for all citizens. Known for his extensive knowledge on UK accessibility legislation, he is the author of the original accessibility statement monitoring in Europe and his work on both statements and disproportionate burden misuse has been discussed by the European Commission as an exemplar for delivering accessibility for public services.
His years of involvement with academia have seen George guest lecturing about accessibility as part of Computer Science curriculums and help set best practice for accessibility in educational materials. George worked with the British Computing Society to develop the Digital Accessibility Specialist Degree Apprenticeship Curriculum.
George's doctoral research is focussed on tactile alternative formats and how new technology offers opportunities to advance options for users.
Ben Watson: Director
Ben, a former law librarian and qualified teacher, has a passion for inclusive design that has led him into researching and implementing approaches to inclusive information and technology provision for education.
He has experience of working with all UK education sectors (primary, secondary, further and higher education) and many years experience of working to improve both the physical and digital accessibility of education organisations.
In 2015 he initiated the OPERA (Opportunity, Productivity, Engagement, Reducing barriers, Achievement) project. This project reconsidered approaches to learning and teaching, digital systems and assistive technologies and catalysed a shift towards anticipatory reasonable adjustments and inclusive practice by design. This work has been hugely influential and was recognised in 2018 with Times Higher Education Award for Outstanding Support for Students.
Ben is also one of the founding chairs of the Further and Higher Education Digital Accessibility Working Group (FHEDAWG) which has worked directly with the Government Digital Service to develop guidance for the Higher and Further Education sectors to best meet obligations under the Public Sector Bodies (Websites and Mobile Applications) Accessibility Regulations 2018.
Ben holds two Masters degrees associated with education and learning development, and is undertaking a PhD at the University of Kent looking at the provision of accessible information in education and developing mechanisms for measuring its impact.
Collaboration
All Able is a committed member of many accessibility communities and we often work with other organisations to further the aims of inclusive practice. Here are some of our collaborators that we often work alongside to provide a wider range of support.
Make Things Accessible is a collaborative project between London-based universities, accessibility community groups and industry partners to share good practice guidance material and resources. The project aims to pool efforts and sector expertise to help everyone deliver more accessible experiences for students and staff.
All Able is contributing some of our most well used resources such as the accessibility statement template, disproportionate burden guidance, and procurement templates to help share good practice.
Textbox are the alt-text specialist who are experts in comprehensive description for complex images. They have a background in publishing and have worked with art galleries, universities, search engine and audio books on image description.
Alistair McNaught is an accessibility expert with an extensive education background. All Able has worked with McNaught Consulting on many projects, both sitting on the Further and Higher Education Digital Accessibility Working Group (FHEDAWG) and significant contributors to the educational accessibility communities.
eLaHub are a team of L&D and accessibility professionals who specialise in eLearning accessibility. Their extensive experience and passion for inclusive learning make them industry leaders in providing services to help organisations improve the learning experience for everyone including people with disabilities and impairments.