What does it take to raise digital accessibility compliance to over 90% across a portfolio of regulated pharmaceutical websites, and keep it there? In this episode, we sit down with Darryl Clews, Strategy Lead for Omnichannel Marketing, and Jason Correia, Marketing Automation Manager, Omnichannel at GSK Canada, to explore how accessibility became embedded in their ways of working. Darryl and Jason share how Ontario's AODA legislation sparked a turning point, why building accessibility in from the start made all the difference, and what it really means to create digital experiences that genuinely serve patients. They also weigh in on the role of AI in speeding up accessibility work, the quiet comeback of FAQs in an answer engine world, and why the curb cut effect is the best metaphor for why accessible design benefits everyone. A must-listen for any team ready to build an accessibility practice that lasts.
[00:00] Linh Ho: Welcome back to the accessible Brand podcast. I'm excited to be back and to welcome two special guests from GSK Canada, one of the world's leading pharmaceutical companies with a purpose to unite science, technology and talent to get ahead disease and a mission to help people do more, feel better and live longer. What a beautiful mission. Darrel Clues is a strategy lead for Omnichannel Marketing at GSK Canada where he has spent more than 24 years building at the intersection of marketing, digital and technology. His current role he leads the design and execution of omnichannel strategies to deliver meaningful experiences for healthcare professionals and patients across Canada.
[00:43] Linh Ho: We also have Jason Correa is the Marketing Automation Manager at GSK Canada where he designs and implements automated journeys, campaign orchestration, accessibility and audience segmentations to ensure consistent personalized experiences across the email, web and paid channels. Together they have led GSK Canada's digital accessibility transformation, raising level AA compliance across their sites to over 90% and their work was recently recognized by the Site Improved Global Digital Accessibility Award Program. Daryl and Jason, welcome to the podcast. Thank you for joining me.
[01:18] Darryl Clews: Thanks for having us. I know that we're both really, really excited to be here today.
[01:22] Linh Ho: Why don't we just start with giving the audience a quick peek into your story, your background and what you do at gsk.
[01:29] Darryl Clews: Yeah, so my name's Darrell Clews. As Lihn mentioned, I am strategy lead for Omnichannel. Today I started my journey at GSK, which is hard to believe 24 years ago. I was in my 20s, started in the IT organization as a developer web developer and worked and progressed in many different roles in it. And one day I made the decision to cross over into marketing and work closely with the business and by doing so I had to take some courses and over the last few been so focused on customer experience, trying to make sure that any of the omnichannel activities that we're doing have the best quality, best in class type of experiences for our healthcare professionals.
[02:20] Darryl Clews: And by doing so, that's why we've kind of partnered with vendors like siteimprove as well, just to make sure that these tools and stuff work correctly in this way that they shouldn't be great.
[02:30] Linh Ho: Thank you for that. And Jason.
[02:32] Jason Correa: Yes. Hi, my name is Jason Correa. My current role is Marketing Automation Manager at gsk. This is my third go around with gsk. I've been back and forth a few times.
[02:53] Jason Correa: My first role at GSK was a global Project Manager. Then I left the organization, came back as a digital delivery lead where I really got involved in the accessibility piece. I was responsible for all of our web development projects at the time and now I've transitioned into my new role of marketing automation.
[03:06] Linh Ho: That's so exciting. And just by the sound of the 24 year tenure, Daryl and then Jason, you've boomerang back multiple times. It just sounds like it's an amazing place to work. What's kept the excitement and how did accessibility become a part of your focus?
[03:25] Darryl Clews: I really enjoyed working with the people in the organization. The mission that GSK has, you know, making sure that we do the right thing for patients and for customers. And I think that's what keeps me motivated. Every day we have new medicines and new products that we're bringing to market that will help people with whatever condition that they may have or be experiencing. And when it came to accessibility, it's really important to make sure that the websites work correctly, that they work correctly for people with the different accessibility needs that they may have.
[03:53] Darryl Clews: And that's why I think it's kept me in this industry and kept me working at a company for so long. And I really just enjoy the work that we do. And it's patient focused.
[04:10] Jason Correa: Yeah, just even things like this, where we have such a strong focus in accessibility, it just shows our inclusive culture here at gsk.
[04:19] Darryl Clews: And I guess several years ago, the Ontario government legislated accessibility, so they came out with aoda, the Accessibility Ontario Disability Act. And so it was one of those things where that kind of made us realize that, hey, we need some, there's some work to be done that we needed to improve our websites. And I think having that legislation and knowing that that was coming and that there could be potential fines, we wanted to make sure that we got ahead of it. And we went through and did an inventory of all our sites to make sure that they met the standards of level A and AA conformance.
[04:55] Linh Ho: Yeah. And on that point, you know, you obviously operate in a very regulated industry where trust is everything. And what about the, you know, as you're talking about some of the compliance requirements that come up, what are some of the digital accessibility challenges that maybe you were facing at the time?
[05:15] Jason Correa: Yeah. So I think for us, like you mentioned, we are in a very regulated space. We can't just go into our sites and make the changes that we need to make. A lot of times, especially if it's from a content perspective, being in a very regulated environment, we have external agencies that review all of our content. For us, it was a matter of doing an inventory on our sites.
[06:01] Jason Correa: Getting a lay of the land in terms of where our gaps were and partnering with a company like siteimprove, it made it a lot easier for us to be able to identify those gaps and once we did, were able to identify those, that's kind of where we were able to then assess the technologies of our different sites and work with our internal partners to then find solutions and implement those solutions so that we could become compliant and ensure that our sites were more accessible.
[06:10] Darryl Clews: And I think for me at the time, being a former developer, I knew that the coding wasn't at the standard of AA and double A. And I think, believe it or not, we found an open source plugin that only worked page by page on our browser. And so you can imagine if you've got several websites with thousands of pages of content, how long it took to use that plugin on each page to check where our conformance was with A and aa. It was very time consuming. And I think once I started with one website and worked with a few others, we realized we would be here forever.
[06:58] Darryl Clews: And so that was when we started to look at other tools that were out there in the market that could help us to automate, help us to basically, in real time, pull all that information, make us realize where we needed to work. Because sometimes what you do is you make the same mistake over and over again and then you realize that once you correct it, then it doesn't happen again, right? So it's one of those things where you go back and you kind of write a bit of a, a playbook or a guidance document so that when you build the website from scratch the next time around, you've thought about all those things that you were doing before that you were repeating over again, right?
[07:26] Linh Ho: And you bring up a good point in the conversation around the tech and the software. And there's more legacy systems and third party plugins and such. You know, a lot of these things are not quick fixes. And especially if there are new guidance for new formats and such. How would you advise starting?
[07:50] Linh Ho: For the audience who may be thinking about starting a, you know, accessibility program,
[07:55] Jason Correa: it comes back to again, just first figuring out where you are, that's the biggest thing. And doing an inventory of your sites using an accessibility tool like, like site improve to be able to scan your sites, get that information, and then it's really about bringing a team together to figure out depending on what industry you are. Like, if you're in a very regulated industry like us, you're going to have to bring in your marketers you're going to have to bring your developers in and get everyone on the same page in order to figure out what needs to be done and create an action plan to then go and figure out how you're going to implement these things dependent on obviously the different technologies. Because a lot of times, you know, you start with one and a company will move to another one and you have these legacy systems.
[08:44] Darryl Clews: And I think what Jason's saying is, you know, you're basically assessing what you need to fix first and where do you start to do the remediation of your websites. But then once you've done that, then the next phase would be training marketers to understand why accessibility is important. And I think Jason also mentioned it's really important to work with your agency partners. If you have agencies where you outsource some of your copywriting and some of your design, there's stuff that you can put in your copy deck that has a column for accessibility requirements right at the very beginning. Because the last thing you want to do is save all that accessibility for the end of the process of building your website.
[09:25] Darryl Clews: But if you can front load it at the very beginning in the copy deck, so that when the copy deck is handed over to the developer, the coder, they see the descriptions there for the alt tags, they see the different explanations for the image and the captions for the videos, those types of things that they already have that content right at the very beginning. And now you're QA ing what was presented versus starting from nothing. And that's what we have found in the past.
[09:51] Jason Correa: And just to add to Darrel's point as well, you know, starting from the beginning, it's about the training and up leveling everyone on the team and even from a design perspective, ensuring that those, those elements are in there. We found that early on in our journey where you'd have a design presented to you and you'd start developing it and you'd get to the QA portion and you'd run your accessibility scans and you'd, you'd notice, oh well, I have all these color contrast issues and it's like, well, we need to make sure we're up leveling all of our people ahead of time at the beginning and our agency partners to make sure that those pieces are caught early on, especially in a very regulated space like ours, that it would be a very costly mistake. We'd have to basically start from scratch and get content reapproved and things like that. So those were really key points that we faced those challenges and we had to overcome them.
[10:44] Linh Ho: Right. And that 100% makes sense. Assess first before you get started, but also making sure that you're putting accessibility at the beginning of the process and not during or after the fact. That could cost, you know, even more if you're having to redo content or, or, you know, relaunch a site and things like that. For sure.
[11:17] Linh Ho: You touched on training, marketing and, and I did see on your website that you are also very transparent with your accessibility statement and what you offer. And that speaks of the training as well on your website that speaks, or web pages speaks to accessibility, which is very impressive. And as you're talking about content and training, marketing, how do you build that capability internally so that it becomes a scalable motion?
[11:37] Darryl Clews: Yeah, I think you just have. It goes with your company's mission. If you can align it with your company's mission, it makes things a lot easier. And so, you know, a lot of the medicines that we make for patients, they may have some of these different accessibility needs. And so if your website can help them with those things, then you're addressing not only the mission, but the, you're inspiring others within the team to want to learn about it and how they can support and implement it.
[12:15] Darryl Clews: And I think when it's come to the training, I think everyone understood the importance of accessibility because a lot of us work with people with different needs and different accessibility requirements and we've always had those things up front.
[12:23] Linh Ho: For us, part of the practice is also you've got parts, automated parts go manual. Right. And you've got some amazing automations and manual testing with folks with maybe diverse backgrounds and diverse practices, and it can be resource intensive. And so how do you ensure that the practice is sustainable?
[12:44] Jason Correa: I think when you build it in to your mind the mindset of everything you do, it makes things a lot easier. To the point that we talked about earlier. If you're thinking about it from the beginning and it's, it's, it's in your mind every step of the way and you have tools like Site improve to support that and automate the pieces that you can. It doesn't really take that much effort, in my opinion. Sure.
[13:13] Jason Correa: We'll, we'll do some additional checks in our QA process, using the site with a screen reader, making sure that everything is accessible that way. But if you're thinking about it through your whole process, it's a very incremental and it makes it really streamlined.
[13:24] Darryl Clews: I think, I think you're onto something there. And the fact that if you have the mindset and everybody believes in that mindset, then it's easy to execute. And if you take a big problem, phase it out into small pieces, then I think it's easier to tackle whatever you're working toward to that ultimate goal. So I think having the mindset is the right approach.
[13:46] Jason Correa: Definitely takes a lot more effort trying to fix something after the fact instead of building it into your process.
[13:52] Linh Ho: That's right. You know, you said something about the mindset and I think more than ever today, that adaptable mindset, or whatever you want to call it, growth mindset is so important with everything else moving so fast around us. And so I'm glad that you, you know that, that you brought this up as, as, as a key point in it. And at the end of the day, you know, also accessibility is about the human I'm going to shift to. You know, you've talked about the challenges, you've talked about the, the operation, how you've, you've built some content governance and, and, and maintaining and sustaining some of the practices.
[14:23] Linh Ho: You've raised level, double level A compliance to over 90% across your sites. Now what drove that progress for us?
[14:36] Jason Correa: When we identified those gaps early on, we knew we needed to change our way of working. And so not to sound like a broken record, like it's literally about building it in to your process. And when you're able, when you have the mindset, when you think about it at every step and you're including the pieces that you need to include, like for instance, at the design level, you're thinking about color contrast in your copy deck, you're thinking about all the different accessibility pieces like alt text and things like that. And you keep doing it over and over. It just becomes part of your day to day and you're part of your process.
[15:11] Jason Correa: When you're able to do that, it's quite easy to get to 90% and maintain that.
[15:19] Darryl Clews: It makes me think of a few years back in marketing when we thought of mobile. First everybody was building websites that were for the desktop and then all of a sudden it's like, oh no, no, no, we need to make sure the desktop website is optimized for mobile. And we tried to build for every device out there, encode for it. I remember we'd have scripts that would detect if it was a BlackBerry or an iPhone and those types of things and even Nokias back in those days. But I think with accessibility, like Jason mentioned, it's accessibility first as well.
[15:50] Darryl Clews: If you think about it at the very beginning, the path to Develop. Being a really great website will be super simple and easy, but if you leave it to the end, then there's a lot of rework.
[16:02] Linh Ho: It's funny that you raised BlackBerry and Nokia. I had one of each at one point in my time.
[16:07] Darryl Clews: I think we all did.
[16:09] Linh Ho: So we talked about the process and the people and the mindset and some of the technology. And you mentioned Site and Proof a couple of times. Can you share a little bit more about your partnership with site and prove and what does it do as part of your accessibility strategy?
[16:24] Jason Correa: I think it's been over 10 years that we've partnered with Siteimprove, so it's been a long journey and I think one of the big things that stood out to us was the ease of use of the tool and being able to give access to a developer and let them go in and see the accessibility issues for themselves and just how clear the tool allows you to identify right on the page visually where, where the gap is and even give suggestions and guidance on how to fix it. It's made it really easy for us to embed this into our process. And even from a governance perspective, being able to report on where we are across all of our sites very easily through a dashboard or through a report has made it extremely easy for us to use.
[17:13] Darryl Clews: Yeah, and I was just going to add that having a tool like siteimprove when you go to do management monitoring, so, you know, every quarter we will do an independent check, we'll pick one or two websites, we'll look at the score, we'll double check what the rate to see if they go down. And having that process in place, some form of an independent business monitoring is really important. So if you were to do that without a tool like siteimprove, you'd be looking at spreadsheets, trying to make heads and tails of things. Whereas with siteimprove you can go into the dashboard, randomly pick one website, do a little bit of an audit on it, see if it's at the, at the ranking and the rating that we think it should be from an accessibility score. And if it's not, why not?
[17:53] Darryl Clews: Did something change? You know, some of these websites have content management systems and content may get deployed and maybe they didn't think about accessibility and that need, but we can we correct it and those types of things. And I think that's where it's having the tool and then having the process really makes a really good opportunity to make sure everything's done correctly.
[18:17] Linh Ho: That's great. And just a side Question. Curious. How many people are users of site improve?
[18:25] Darryl Clews: Very few. Like I think in Canada, I think we're under 15. But when you think about in marketing, you know, we have probably around 50 people in marketing and then we have a number of different agency partners and developers that we work with and production people. But when you think about our website, you could have several people touching a website. It's just that at different points they get information disseminated to them from site and prove.
[18:53] Linh Ho: So how did you make accessibility part of, you know, you're talking about the day to day. How did you make accessibility part of your day to day for the different audiences? Or you've got content authors, you've got developers and agency partners as well who may not be specialists on the platform or you know, part of the organization itself. Like how did you make that as part of the day to day for everyone?
[19:16] Jason Correa: It starts with the training and having the proper training in place, especially with agency partners and even in our marketing division, you know, people come and go, there's a lot of turnover usually. So having having that training in place where if, if a new person comes on board or a new partner comes on board, accessibility is part of their training and, and onboarding. It makes it really easy for us to uplevel them from that perspective and then basically from there having the subject matter experts internally that are there throughout the process to support them in the journey and for the project as well, that's been a critical piece for us.
[19:58] Linh Ho: But any examples that you can give around those outcomes or results that you spoke about?
[20:05] Darryl Clews: I think of when we publish a respiratory related type website, patients will often need their prescription in order to access that website. And so you need your DIN number, there's a few pieces of criteria that's needed. And so when they use our product related websites they have to be first of all WCAG compliant, they have to be optimized for accessibility and they have to have semantic headings, properly labeled controls, keyboard navigation, high contrast text, descriptive alt text and has to be in clear plain language, especially if we have step by step instructions on how to use your medication. So it's one of those things where not only do we have to make sure that the steps are correct on how to use the type of medication that you may be using, but also to make sure that the accessibility matches as well. And so it's probably the best example I can give of where it's real life and a real scenario that that happens for the patient.
[21:05] Linh Ho: That's a beautiful example. We can't hide from AI, Right. It's, it's here, it's been here. How are you thinking about, you know, the impact of AI on accessibility as it becomes, you know, more prominent in, in our daily lives?
[21:21] Darryl Clews: You know, I think we're all learning as fast as it's coming. And I think the pros or the benefits that I see of AI is the speed that accessibility could happen. Like the improvements maybe with auto alt text, the auto of captioning, you know, plain language summaries, remediation, personalization. But I think what we also understand is there are risks. And so we've seen some things where they're saying that AI will hallucinate or provide some form of bias or maybe not interpreting the privacy or the compliance correctly.
[22:00] Darryl Clews: And especially when you have different compliance for different countries or regions and things like that, it may not understand the distinctions. So I think we're still learning what, what it can do, but I'm excited that, that it could be very positive and the fact that it could speed things up.
[22:16] Jason Correa: Yeah, it's, it's something that's continuing to change and we, it's one of the things that we have at the forefront of our mind is like how, how do we make sure that, to Daryl's point, that all of our content is accurate and correct and how do we make sure that the proper information is getting to people when they need it and AI is just continuing to speed that process up.
[22:40] Linh Ho: I agree with you Dara. The AI is here to help speed up a lot of the tasks that maybe we can certainly have AI help with the captioning and the whole task and test the alt text and even like the PDF remediations and things like that. And, and then on the other hand is because AI also is speeding up the content development and there's more because that was the first area, right. That people start playing with was creating content and images and when it first came out. And so there are definitely some concerns.
[23:15] Linh Ho: Well, how do we make sure that all these, you know, these new contents and websites are also accessible. And speaking of which, you know, as you said that accessibility gives us the foundation and the practices to provide, you know, very structured content. And, and I think having that foundation might also be, or it is, you know, already seeing as the foundation to help companies actually show up in those LLMs and the ChatGPT and the, you know, perplexity and cloud and so on. Which leads me to my next question on, you know, answer engines. Right.
[23:51] Linh Ho: It's been top of mind given the search behavior is changing and folks are now, you know, even the B2B companies and certainly B2C as well. Like you want to make sure you show up in those engines when folks are searching for solutions. So how are you thinking about answer engine optimization?
[24:12] Darryl Clews: And it'll be interesting to see how it works because in Canada our legislation's a little bit different in the fact that if you're a patient you need a DIN number in order to access the website. So it would be difficult for some of these LMMs to pull in some of the content that we may have. So that might be an advantage for us in Canada. Whereas in the US some of that content is publicly facing. Where the LLMs may have an advantage is on our vaccine related content because it's preventative and you have the choice to work with your physician and make the right decision when it comes to getting vaccinated for the the ailment that you may have.
[24:54] Darryl Clews: So to me it's one of those things where we're not sure really where it will go. But what I would say is when it comes to a website, it's really important to have it structured correctly, have those accessibility things at the front. And I think it would probably help for those AI tools to pull that information probably in a certain structured way because I think just that's the way AI is working. Things are highly formatted, structured well. And when you're searching or looking for something, if you focus on areas that are like frequently asked questions, because I think that's where we're learning with prompting is if you ask it a question, you're going to get a certain answer which is different from the way that we've been searching in the past with keywords and things like that.
[25:36] Darryl Clews: So sites that have bring back the FAQ section may stand out compared to some of these other sites. Is what is my guess or estimate what could happen?
[25:53] Linh Ho: I suppose actually you're the second I've heard it a couple of times already that FAQs may be making a comeback
[26:00] Darryl Clews: similar to QR codes during COVID One
[26:04] Linh Ho: question, one answer, right? And as you say, the prompts are asking the questions, answer engines are looking for answers. I know we're coming down to the last little bit here. Within the next 15 minutes I have three more questions just as our closing. If you could go back to the start of this journey with everything that you know and you've experienced so far, would you do anything differently?
[26:28] Darryl Clews: I think for me personally, probably not. I think you need to learn, you need to go through the process, I think for us the change in legislation kind of gave us the push to find out that there was some stuff that needed to be corrected or a certain level of accessibility. And so I think that push was helpful and then it was really just working through that assessment of what we needed to do and improve and then just work towards making it a better process every year and doing the training. I don't know think I would do it any differently, to be honest.
[27:05] Jason Correa: Yeah, I mean, obviously if you better understood accessibility from the start, it would make things a lot easier. And I mean, you're always learning and you're always improving how you do things. So if we had a magic wand, if we were able to understand accessibility and how it, how it fit into our process better from the beginning, that obviously would be beneficial. But as Darrell said, like, it was a great learning and it's, it's helped us on our journey for that and, and other things like AI, where it's going to help us there as well because, because we're going to have to learn and adapt just like we did for accessibility. So.
[27:43] Linh Ho: And I think, you know, as we're talking about, you know, AI and we're all learning, the technical skill set may not necessarily be there just yet for some, but what mindset do you think will matter more than that technical skill set in the coming years?
[27:57] Jason Correa: It's really having the customer focused mindset and understanding as a consumer, how are you going to consume content and where are you going to consume content and what channels are you going to be involved in and having that mindset to then figure out how do we produce the content and meet the customer where they are or the patient where they are to make sure that they're getting the right information when they need it. So I think that's where we are right now. Like we're heavily focused on that to kind of what is the future going to hold and how do we, how do we make sure we're there?
[28:33] Darryl Clews: Jason's saying it's just how people are going to consume content and just really monitoring how that innovation with AI is going to unfold. Not necessarily a wait and see, but wait and be prepared in some form and fashion. And in terms of the skill set, it's hard to know what you need for the future. But I think marketing is becoming more technical than it ever has been. You know, you see people that are crossing over into this field from computer science, engineering backgrounds, things like that.
[29:00] Linh Ho: And my last question for the both of you is if we wanted the audience to remember one thing from this conversation. What would you want them to remember?
[29:11] Darryl Clews: You know, I think for me, I came to a realization pretty early in my accessibility journey, like learning how to build websites, learning that, for example, a sidewalk today has a curb cut on the sidewalk, and it was probably intended for those maybe with a wheelchair or using a walker. However, others benefit from that same curb cut. So mothers with strollers, parents with strollers, kids with scooters and bikes. And I think when it comes to accessibility, it's very similar that you could also apply it. It's very similar to SEO.
[29:48] Darryl Clews: It helps you make your website better. So an alt tag benefits everybody. It not only benefits somebody with an accessibility need, but it also improves your search engine optimization. So if anything I would say is try to find the curb cuts when you're doing your accessibility implementation, because there's a lot of things that you can draw on that will make that experience better for the users of your website, regardless of member of public or anybody that might be wanting to learn more about your product or service.
[30:19] Linh Ho: I like that a lot. And Jason, how about you?
[30:22] Jason Correa: It really comes down to, I mean, obviously if someone's listening to this, they're probably interested in accessibility. So I think the accessibility mindset first and building that into everything that you do, it makes it very manageable and makes it very easy to accomplish.
[30:40] Linh Ho: Thank you for closing out the podcast with Accessibility Mindset First. That concludes this podcast episode of the Accessible brand. And thank you listeners for joining us. If this episode inspired you, help us share the stories and subscribe to stay tuned for the next episode. For more information about this podcast series, please visit sightimprove.com podcast again, my name is Lynn Ho. You're a host. Thank you for joining me.