The Accessibility Apprenticeship Revolution

Dimple Khagram, founder and CEO of Purple Beard Training, talks about creating the UK's first Accessibility Specialist Apprenticeship in an interview with Antonio Santos and Neil Milliken. What began as a passion project has expanded into a major educational programme, with seven graduates earning five distinctions and 40 additional apprentices still completing the course.

The journey wasn't straightforward. Dimple shares how her own experience with burnout inspired her to establish Purple Beard—a company whose quirky name deliberately challenges traditional educational norms. This recurring theme of professionals discovering accessibility after significant life changes emerges as a compelling undercurrent throughout the discussion.

Developing an effective accessibility curriculum proved especially difficult. Purple Beard spent nearly two years designing a programme that combines technical expertise with practical application across various areas: legislation, content design, testing, web development tools, and ethics. Their experience highlights why accessibility is a specialised profession requiring dedicated training rather than just an extension of software development.

What truly stands out are the motivations of accessibility apprentices. Regardless of their backgrounds, they all share a strong desire to create an equitable digital world, often driven by personal experiences with accessibility needs. This passion is vital as they face organisational resistance when advocating for accessibility in environments where it was not originally prioritised.

The discussion takes a thought-provoking turn when examining how accessibility relates to wider societal shifts. Are we becoming overly individualistic? How might we channel the time saved through AI and technology into community building and inclusive design? As Dimple observes, "How do we step back from the individualistic approach and say we want to make this better for everybody?"

Are you curious about how specialised accessibility training is transforming organisations and fostering digital experiences that are inclusive for all? This episode offers practical insights for both accessibility specialists and anyone eager to develop more inclusive digital environments.

Chapters

• 0:00 Meet Dimple Pagran of Purple Beard
• 4:07 Why "Purple Beard" as a name?
• 6:09 Accessibility Apprenticeship Impact and Journey
• 9:02 Pitching Accessibility: Making it Relatable
• 14:37 Creating the Apprenticeship Curriculum
• 19:20 Apprentice Motivations and Accessibility Passion
• 22:09 Building Community Over Individualism
• 25:20 Managing Conflict in Accessibility Work

Transcript

Neil Milliken: 0:00

Hello and welcome to AXS Chat. I'm delighted that we're joined today by Dimple Khagram, who is the founder and CEO of Purple Beard Training, and the reason that I first started talking to Dimple was because of something that's very close to my heart, which is accessibility apprenticeships. So, Dimple, welcome to Access Chat and please tell us a little bit about Purple Beard training and then we can talk about you know the fact that Purple Beard was the first training provider to actually implement the Accessibility Specialist Apprenticeship in the UK.

Dimple Khagram: 0:40

Sure, thank you, neil. My name is Dimple. Like Neil said, I am the founder of Purple Beard. I'm also a university dropout and I work in education, which is a bit of an oxymoron, really, if you think about it. Kenya I got into training by default, but I wanted to work in an industry where I could make an impact, help other people. So I'd been through lots of different you know industries. I was a bit of a hustler, all sorts of things, traveled quite a bit across Africa and worked across different projects. So I started my career in sales and education and I really, really enjoyed it. So I started a company a few years ago and Purple Beard came about as a result of me coming out of a nervous breakdown burnout, actually and yes, that's how Purple Beard was born. We've trained about 1400 people since 2021. That's when we started. Digital accessibility has been a really interesting journey, you know, and very exciting as well, and it continues to be exciting. So thank you very much, leo, for having me here thank you, goodness.

Neil Milliken: 1:53

I didn't know that part about the sort of founder part about your story and it's really, really interesting because last week we were talking to Yulia from Sanofi about her journey into accessibility and that also came out after recovery from burnout. So we've got a bit of a repeating theme here of people, you know, working too hard, running too fast, burning out and then reappraising and resetting their lives. So there's definitely something in there for us to consider. Firstly, I've never asked the question but always been curious why purple beard? I mean, I don't see any purple whiskers.

Dimple Khagram: 2:37

I know I think it was a name me and a friend of mine came up with and it kind of stuck because you'd see a lot of training companies with skills and you know, and we said you know, I said I want my company to be something edgy. I'd had a company previously which I sold on. It was called Skill Something and I said I just want the name of the company to be to speak for itself. So someone can ask me what is this? What does Purple Beer do? Are you marketing? What are you? Are you a joke? And I was like I think that'd be quite funny. So I think for me it was more about having a laugh. It was a big LOL to something as serious as education, which I take very seriously. But I think that's how it came about and it sort of stuck. During our operations I was asked do you want to change the name of the company? And we put out a survey to some of our students and our stakeholders and 80% said no. They said we really love the name.

Antonio Santos: 3:38

So I presume that having a purple beard is not a requirement to work at the company.

Dimple Khagram: 3:45

Absolutely not. In fact, it's quite funny 70% of our workforce is made of females who don't have beards. You know? Yes, no, absolutely not.

Antonio Santos: 3:56

So, in terms of training and when you are doing training on accessibility, what have been, let's say, the feedback that you have from the users who received the training in terms of door opening?

Dimple Khagram: 4:12

So I think it's Antonio. It's been a really interesting journey and this is thanks to ATOS, because I think it started from ATOS. Yeah, you know this conversation about moving this apprenticeship forward. So we said we'd offer this apprenticeship. We started looking at it and we've now got seven apprentices who've completed, of which five got distinctions, one got a pass and one got a merit. So the grades have been really, really high and we've got another 40 in training will complete between next year and 2027 from large organizations and small organizations.

Dimple Khagram: 4:49

With small organizations, it's been a bit difficult in terms of them understanding the importance of accessibility. So, you know, when I have conversations with customers, some of the new ones, some of them don't even know the importance of digital accessibility. That's the question they ask me why? And I'm like why not? And I'm like why are you asking about the why? Because we've got to think about, since COVID or even before that, we all went online. So when we don't make our websites, our documentation, our services accessible, where somebody can, you know it's good for everybody. So you know, I use text to speech all the time. Speech to text all the time because it really really helps me.

Dimple Khagram: 5:33

You know, in the past it was always a struggle reading long documents and trying to get my head around, but I think when organizations start thinking about it, that it's really making it easy for everybody, then accessibility really it's not an afterthought, it needs to be the first thing we all need to think about. So I think, coming back to your question, because I'm kind of getting a bit going around the houses I think the impact has been really great. So we've had these six apprentices, seven apprentices complete. We've got more who are completing. They're doing some great work for their organizations, from testing the websites to share points, to raising awareness about accessibility, to doing advocacy about accessibility and to really thinking about it from the ground up. So it's no longer a top-down approach, it's about a bottom-up approach where everybody's thinking about it. Teams are asking questions Are my heading structures right on this document? Is my email, you know? Do we have alt text on an image? So those are the kind of things that apprentices are bringing to the awareness of large organizations.

Antonio Santos: 6:39

So just to follow on, kind of to understand your pitch for organizations, sometimes people don't look at things that are related with accessibility as accessibility. I was at an event and one of my friends had the phone with the fonts at the highest size as possible. You look at this phone, wow, the fonts were really big. And then we ended up in a kind of a small talk and he was not conscious that that was accessibility. So we were using an accessibility feature but people are not really aware that's accessibility. So my question to you is when you are trying to pitch the courses, how do you start?

Dimple Khagram: 7:22

We normally ask I think the first question I've started asking can everybody understand and read your emails, irrespective of their ability or disability? And sometimes people look at me and they're like, oh, we're not sure. And I'm like, let's do it now, let's run it through an accessibility checker and the Microsoft accessibility checker and you know the Microsoft accessibility checker with, you know, high contrast of the text, no alt text on images. And these are large organizations, because I normally speak to HR and training leads first, in the first instance, and they're completely unaware and I'm like, okay, what do you think happens to somebody who needs a screen reader? And they're like, don't know. We're like, okay, let's try this. And I think it completely opens their mind on some of these real baseline skills. And sometimes we ask you know, if you have an uncle who's elderly, who can't see, how do they check the phone? They're like, oh, we make the font size bigger. And I'm like that is accessibility.

Dimple Khagram: 8:22

So I think sometimes it's this how do we relate it to what we do on a day-to-day basis? How do we become more conscious of it when we're sending an email, when we're writing a document, when we're writing an email, how do we simplify and not use jargon. How do we just use plain English rather than complicating things where the other person does not understand? And this applies for me, you know, I like plain English because sometimes it's. You know, I'm like I just need to kind of simplify it. Simplify it to me, say it to me in five words rather than five paragraphs.

Antonio Santos: 8:58

And some people can be really good writing long emails saying absolutely nothing, right.

Dimple Khagram: 9:06

Yes, yes, yes. And then I think the other thing, antonio, is to think about. You know, globally, we think about the amount of information that's thrown at us. It's a lot of information, you know. How do we understand it all? How do we make it, you know, digestible? So you know, digital accessibility plays a really big role in in that, and I don't think we need to think about it as a nice to have as a tick box because we've got to meet the web conformance accessibility guidelines. We've got to think about it as it's a baseline.

Neil Milliken: 9:39

You don't even think it's there, it's just there yeah, I, I think Sometimes the whole sort of fact that people don't understand that disability is a sort of spectrum and we're all on that spectrum of sort of as we age, needing eyesight degrades, hearing degrades I'm being really cheerful but people don't think of that as disability. That's just getting older and they don't associate that. And then they also associate, you know, accessibility. If they do know what it means, they associate it with disability and they associate it with the far end of the spectrum rather than actually this, this thing. That is really about customization to meet your needs of how you want to consume and interact with information. So people think, oh well, that's not for me, that's very niche, when actually it's. It covers pretty much everyone at some point, and especially when you're thinking about situational disability and so on. So it's sort of how we communicate about why this is important and sort of the framing of it so that people understand the relevance. And I think once you've done that framing, people get it. But if I could take a step back right, because I know that you said you know we'd initiated some of the conversations with you about the apprenticeship and I know that offline you'd said gosh, this was one of the toughest things that we've had to do and I found the process and I need to give credit where credit is due A lot of the work that was done on the apprenticeship standard was done by other people as well.

Neil Milliken: 11:31

So, yeah, some really significant contributions from Shell, particularly Jodie Greer, and contributions from AbilityNet also, and there were others. Barclays Bank and BBC and others contributed to this. But the one person that was really constantly working on this was mark wilcox, who was one of our first apprentices before we had the, the actual standard. So kudos to mark, but for one.

Neil Milliken: 11:59

But we found it hard. We found it very difficult to go through the process of working with the institute for apprenticeships to get to be understood that it was actually an occupation in its own right and the structure of this and the way that those things were explained to us, because we are too close to it, we're not, we're accessibility people, we're too close to the day-to-day and we're not into the pedagogy and the sort of process of course, design and understanding all of that. So we found that difficult, right, and we weren't even designing courses. What we were doing with xs the abstraction of that sort of thinking about what are the, what are the what's, the knowledge, the skills, the behaviors, the duties that you need to carry out if you're doing this job right, and so that process was a challenge for us.

Neil Milliken: 12:58

It took us, frankly, a number of years to get there, and then we sort of wrap it up and we go right education providers dimple right now, go and make a course. So what were the? What were the things that you found then challenging? Taking our skeleton outline and turning that into something that then, at the end, spits out accessibility specialists so I think initially we spoke to iap and kind of looked at what they had.

Dimple Khagram: 13:27

We looked at what Duke had as well and said, okay, how are we going to make something that's fit for purpose? And it's been a work in progress. Only now, two years on, we have a product. I mean, you know, we have a product that meets it all meets the Ks, ss and Bs and is really seamless in terms of the journey.

Dimple Khagram: 13:48

So you know, initially when we started, we were doing some of the modules in a haphazard way. We knew what kind of modules we wanted. In some there was too much, in some there was too little. So, for example, you know, development, html, css, javascript are some of the cases and mobile development is part of the accessibility standard. So initially we had almost a front-end development course and onto the, and it was too much because, you know, when we were speaking to apprentices who were doing the work on a day-to-day basis, they were saying, but we're not coding, we're not coding the website, especially for large organizations. And we sort of had to take a step back and said you've got to understand how to read other people's code in order to pull out what the issues are, especially with large organizations where they might have a multi you know, cross-functional team really. So it's. I think those are the things we really needed to look at and it's taken us two years. We've had lots of really good feedback from our employers ATOS included the DWP. So they've given us some really good feedback and said think about it like this but their own lived experience, learned experience and what do we do on a day-to-day basis? So now we have a program that is really versatile and that lends itself to different types of organization.

Dimple Khagram: 15:09

But initially it was we were like but we were literally kind of developing stuff and saying, actually, this doesn't work, we need to change it for the next session. Literally, that's what we were doing in the first year. But you know, putting stuff out there and asking for feedback and apprentices saying I'm not sure about this, it might not work in my context. So we're like okay, what elements are going to work in your context? Let's leave those, let's take the others away.

Dimple Khagram: 15:36

Also, from the apprentice's perspective, there was a lot to learn, a lot of skills. They needed to learn about legislation. They needed to learn about content and design. They needed to learn about testing and audit. They needed to learn about testing and audit. They needed to learn about accessibility, tools and technologies. They needed to learn about web development. They needed to learn about security and data, and you know the ethics around it. That brings it all kind of together.

Dimple Khagram: 16:01

So, as you can imagine, it was, you know, bringing different specialisms together under one program. That gives you a lot of the skills at you know, and not just not at a you know, a level four. So when you're looking at a level four in vocational language, it's first year, second year of a degree, but it's about knowing how to do it, not just writing about it. It can't be abstract knowledge, it's got to be. This is the knowledge and how am I applying it in order to develop my wider skills. And this is just the tip of the iceberg. This is a really good baseline. It's really great for bringing those things together. You know the skills, knowledge, skills and behaviors together and just to move forward and then say, okay, this is what I'm going to specialize in.

Neil Milliken: 16:49

I might become web, yeah here's a here's a fascinating mix of different knowledge areas and skills, and this was one of the challenges that we had from the institute for apprenticeships when we, when we were trying to to set it up in the first place, when they were saying, oh, we got rejected the first time because they said we don't think that accessibility is an occupation, we think it's software development. We went, went. Well, no, it's not software development. I mean, we based our first apprenticeships on, we tacked on all of the accessibility stuff to the software development apprenticeships that we were running in Atos. So the approach that you took was quite similar to what we'd done when we did it.

Neil Milliken: 17:36

But yeah, it's all of those other areas that you need to draw in. It's a very sort of you need knowledge across a really wide set of different sort of disciplines. That in itself then makes this you know, generalism into a specialism, if you like, because you know, compared to someone that spends all of their time doing front-end development, you know the accessibility person is a generalist when it comes to their coding knowledge, but it's when you apply all of those other areas of knowledge that it becomes a specialism in its own right.

Dimple Khagram: 18:13

Especially audit and testing. Testing is a really big part of the apprenticeship and even from if you look at the knowledge, skills and skills and behaviors. You know you've got to be able to use automated testing, but you have to understand manual testing. You know and, and you can't test something if you don't know the premise of what you're testing. So I think I think those are the things that, uh, you know and we learned and developed along the way. So, for it was a huge learning curve as well, because you think about it. But, like you said earlier on, accessibility is seen as when, a few years ago, it was about having is your building D1? That means, does it have a ramp and does it have a lift right? So a D1 building was considered part of accessibility. It's not just a D1 building, that's a physical space. We're looking at the online space, which is more and more inhabited by people, especially after COVID.

Antonio Santos: 19:09

If you look at the profiles of your students people what can you tell us about their motivations to do the training? Can you tell us about their motivations to do the training?

Dimple Khagram: 19:19

I think there are one thing you know, one thing I'll say to you, and I think now, having had onboarded so many apprentices, they're all, they're all passionate about accessibility. You know they want to, they want to create an equal digital world. I think that's a thread that brings them all together. They want to make a difference, they want to make an impact and they want to raise awareness about, and some of them come from lived experiences or some of them have families. You know who you know parents might be disabled. So I think it's that thread that kind of brings them all together. You know, some of most of our apprentices are also neurodiverse. So I think it's those really interesting things, you know interesting aspects that bring them together and it's really, I think, the most important thing for them is that they really want to make a difference.

Antonio Santos: 20:10

Something that we experience over doing these talks here on Access Trust is everyone that the majority of people that works they feel comes from a reason. Could be a personal reason, so, but how can we also go beyond that?

Dimple Khagram: 20:24

I suppose we've. I suppose I think the thing is that we've become a very individualistic society, right? So we and you know this has happened in the last 40 years, 30, 40 years there's been a breakdown of communities and now we've got AI thrown in the mix and you see all these memes about people not being able to communicate with each other because they're more comfortable communicating with their agentic AI. And I think it's we've got to think about. You know, just last week somebody said, oh, you can use AI and save six or 10 or 20 hours a week. And I'm like, yeah, great, but what are we going to do with that time? How are we going to use that time? Are we going to use it for building and supporting our communities? Are we going to use that time for our own sort of self-care and development? How are we going to use that time? Or are we going to pack more work into that time? So you know what is it.

Dimple Khagram: 21:17

These are bigger questions to ask, right. So it's you know, how do we kind of step back from the individualistic approach and say we want to make this better for everybody, not just for myself or not just for you know, but for everybody, when we're thinking about building something, let's build something for everyone, and I know that might sound a bit altruistic. You know because I work in education and one of the things we are asked to do in our classroom is differentiation. So differentiation means is you know, if you need, if you have a specific learning style, we differentiate and give you resources to support with your you know, your learning style, your learning need, need and so on and so forth. Yeah, but then you've also got to find where there's differentiation. There also there's got to be um, coming together where you're sharing, where you're supporting each other. Understand the other person's point of view.

Neil Milliken: 22:12

That empathy, yeah, so yeah so, which is very like accessibility in many ways, because you're having you know with accessibility presenting things in many ways, because you're having you know, with accessibility presenting things in different ways, you're consuming things through different means, but at the same time, what you're wanting to do is make sure that everybody has an equivalently positive outcome. So we have to sort of then converge back on thinking about what those outcomes will be and and like you, I have an altruistic bent and I want to do stuff that has a positive impact on society. And I also think that when we look at designing businesses and processes and stuff like that, there should be no reason why we cannot make good money from doing good things. We're all tearing our hair out at the moment. Everybody's selfish, we've got all sorts of conflicts and polarization in the world. I hope that we'll come out the other side and we can build something a bit more cohesive.

Neil Milliken: 23:21

I do think that we ought to be focusing on those wins and designing businesses and teaching people how to do business in a collaborative way, and one of the other things that I think we were thinking about when we were doing apprenticeships was and certainly we were teaching our own apprentices was how to sort of manage conflict. I'm not talking about fisticuffs here, but I'm talking about the fact that quite often accessibility hasn't been considered in an organization or in a project. You can end up being quite unpopular as the accessibility person. I think for anyone that's listening to the sound effects they need to know that Dimple has a little pug down below and it's Sorry.

Dimple Khagram: 24:06

Sorry about that. She's going yeah, about my desk. She's like all right, I want to get involved as well. I know, and she's got really bad.

Neil Milliken: 24:14

It's not the first time we've had canine you know canine um guest stars, but uh, but we do have an audio version of this, so, um, so it's best to audio describe what the what's going on in the background. So I do think that that that sort of teaching people how to understand empathy and and the soft skills is an area where it was something that we really thought about quite a lot when we were trying to design the apprenticeships, because we've dealt with a lot of conflict and pushback and everything else, and whilst I know that apprenticeships are aimed at every age group so it's not just young people leaving school, but also for people that want to get re rescaled and whatever the reality is that if you are a school leaver and still the majority of people that are going through apprenticeship are relatively young, you don't necessarily have the experience on how to deal with that.

Dimple Khagram: 25:10

And you're absolutely right, and I think we've also seen I think there was, you know, I think, with the cohort size, the cohort for this we've had apprentices who've come on board. This is their second job because it's a level four and, you know, you've got to be able to communicate and you've got to understand how to manage different stakeholders. Because, neil, you're absolutely right, there is quite a bit of conflict when someone says, actually, have you thought about accessibility? You know, when a web developer brings a website and says, oh, look at this, it's beautiful. And then the accessibility person comes and says, hmm, but you know, does the color contrast work? You know, is it compatible with the screen reader? All of these things, is the font size right? And all of a sudden it's like, huh, what are you talking about? Right, and it's. You know it's not.

Dimple Khagram: 26:03

I think I'm not. You know, and I'm not giving developers a bad name. A lot of developers do think about it, but sometimes, you know, it's like some developers may not be aware about the importance of these aspects of, you know, a website. Or when you have your whole content marketing team churning out loads of lovely content, you know, without videos, without captions, and saying, there you go. We've made a wonderful video where we spent three months and £25,000. But guess what? It's got no captions.

Neil Milliken: 26:35

Yes.

Dimple Khagram: 26:37

Yeah, and this has actually happened frequently, yes but yeah so.

Neil Milliken: 26:43

so you know I'm, I'm there, you know I'm raining on people's parades all of the time, and and so you have to find ways to be able to do that without causing too much conflict. Sometimes it's unavoidable, you know, but it's, it's how to manage. So I think that those soft skills are super important and I think that they can be more broadly applicable beyond accessibility, and I hope that you know that's something that carries into some of the other apprenticeships that you do. We have reached the end of our half hour.

Dimple Khagram: 27:18

Lovely.

Neil Milliken: 27:19

A real pleasure talking to you.

Dimple Khagram: 27:20

Thank you, Thank you so much both.

Neil Milliken: 27:22

I need to thank you multiple times for supporting my passion project. This is the thing that, honestly, I'm proudest of for doing. Thank you for being part of that. Thank you to our friends at amazon and my clear text for keeping us online on air and accessible, and thank you. Speak to you all again soon okay, take care.

Dimple Khagram: 27:50

Thanks, bye.