Heather Hepburn: Leading the Charge for Accessibility at Skyscanner

A single UX critique and one candid email from a blind traveler set off a chain reaction inside Skyscanner: a grassroots movement, a formal program, and a culture that treats accessibility as core product quality. We sit down with Heather Hepburn—Head of Accessibility at Skyscanner and co-founder of the Champions of Accessibility Network—to unpack how real user stories, practical structure, and community energy turn good intentions into measurable change.

Heather walks us through the early days: a quiet Slack channel, a room of curious allies, and leadership’s turning point when they saw how exclusion blocks customers from booking. From there, she shows how to make momentum stick—creating a champions pathway with training and one-to-ones, appointing a lead accessibility engineer to anchor the technical depth, and sharing hard-won patterns with partners and peers. We also explore the CAN community on LinkedIn, a sales-free space where thousands swap tactics, tools, and encouragement.

Education is the other engine. Heather explains how Teach Access Europe connects industry and universities to weave accessibility into computer science and UX curricula, supporting lecturers with resources and realistic assessment. We spotlight hands-on university collaborations: student projects centered on accessibility, live sessions with a disabled testing panel, and the Skyscanner Accessibility and Inclusion Award that elevates practical solutions, like tools for dyslexic learners. The message is clear: when students graduate with inclusive habits, teams ship better products faster.

We close by taking accessibility beyond the usual echo chambers—onto travel industry stages and into business schools—meeting leaders where they are with clear demos, data, and language that resonates with strategy, risk, and growth. Want to help build the next wave of inclusive tech? Join the Champions of Accessibility Network on LinkedIn, explore teachaccess.org/europe, and share this conversation with a colleague who signs off on roadmaps or curriculums. If this episode moved you, subscribe, leave a review, and tell us where you’ll start change today.

Chapters

• 0:00 Heather Hepburn Joins Access Chat
• 2:10 Spotting Gaps And Starting A Program
• 5:10 Building An Internal Champions Network
• 8:30 Scaling Across A Global Company
• 10:40 Teach Access Europe Takes Shape
• 15:00 Personal Motivation And User Impact
• 19:00 Formalising Champions And Technical Leadership
• 23:30 Community Beyond The Company: CAN Network
• 27:00 Embedding Accessibility In Higher Education

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Hello and welcome to AXSChat. And I'm delighted that we're joined today by Heather Hepburn. Heather is a passionate accessibility evangelist and she kickstarted the accessibility program at Sky Scanner, the website and app that helps you find cheap flights and travel options around the world. And she's now there as the head of accessibility, but she's also played a very active role in the accessibility community because she is a co-founder of the Champions of Accessibility Network on LinkedIn, which is a community of thousands of people working in the accessibility space. Alongside our friend Gareth Ford Williams really kick-started the idea of Champions when he was working at BBC. On top of that, because what good accessibility specialist doesn't have multiple streams of their bow? Heather is also working on the Teach Access Europe initiative where she's on the steering committee now. This is really close to my heart as someone that's worked on in improving and increasing access to accessibility skills. Also participating in this because I think it's a great initiative, as we need to get accessibility embedded into the pedagogy and the teaching of mainstream technology skills. Welcome, Heather. Slightly long introduction there, but I'm really glad that you are able to join us today. So tell us what I got wrong about you in your introduction and a little bit about the backstory of how you came to work in accessibility, if you would.

Speaker 2: 1:30

Oh well, thank you very much for having me. It was very lovely to be here. The intro was yeah, pretty spot on, actually. I'm glad you mentioned the teach access stuff because I would like to talk about that at some point. But background of how I got started in this, I have only been doing it for about six years. I've been with SkyScanner for seven years. And before Sky Scanner, I was a content designer. So when I joined Skyscanner, I joined as a content designer with an interest in accessibility because I had learnt about it in my previous role at RBS. And we had a couple of great accessibility champions there who taught me what I should know, and it just became part of our process on how we built accessible account opening systems. So joined SkyScanner, and it's actually during my interview process that they asked me to do a UX critique of our app. And that's when I realized that there were quite a few accessibility issues with Skyscanner, and actually they weren't even thinking about accessibility at all. So just from a quick look over a weekend, I was able to spot that. So wanted to share my findings and ask, you know, why is nothing happening? And that's really how things started. I did I got the job and I got I started as a content designer. But this was gnawing away at me in the background. So I joined the there was an accessibility Slack channel, and I joined that and said, Hey, hi, can I help? Is anything happening? It was very quiet. So I got people together from that Slack channel to put in a meeting and said, Does anyone want to come along and chat about what might have gone on before now? And 30 people came to that, which was amazing. People who were really passionate about it, but hadn't, or maybe had done something in the in the past and it hadn't stuck, or people just interested in the subject. So I would say that was like the start of our accessibility network, our champions network, that first meeting, because we kept meeting up every month after that. And we just got this ball rolling. I took it up to management about like we need to do something with this, and here's what I propose, how we start things off. And they they kind of said yes, we get it. We didn't know that we were excluding people, and now we do, so please go and fix that. So yeah, it's been it's been I was really lucky to get the opportunity to just go and do it, but I didn't really know what I was doing at the start. It's been a building a program from nothing, just trying to do what I felt was right, making some mistakes, and yeah, it's it's going really well. And that's six years ago now, so it's it's been very, a very wonderful time just seeing the growth in the program and seeing how the skyscanner products have become so much more accessible. We're not perfect yet by any means, but we're much more accessible. Uh our designers and engineers know what they're doing, and we can share that now because we have been doing it for a while, so we share it with our partners as well and the wider community. So it's yeah, it's great. I can't imagine now doing anything else.

Speaker 1: 4:22

And and I uh just give us a sort of idea of how many people work for Skyscanner. What's what kind of size is the operation? I know it's a a well-known site.

Speaker 2: 4:32

Yeah. So there's about 1,600 staff, I think, at the moment. Half of them are software developers or engineers, as we call them. And we're over, I think, nine offices around the world. So I'm not going to get them all here, but London, Edinburgh, Glasgow. Well, it was an Edinburgh-based startup, tech startup, I think 20 years ago. Um so we've got three offices in the UK, Barcelona, and then as far away as China, China's uh in Shenzhen, that's our furthest away office. Still with like 300 people in it or something. So it's not quite big.

Speaker 1: 5:03

So yeah, quite a quite a sizable operation and and and so you know, uh a chance to build a decent community. So you said that you really w and I know I'm I'm I'm hogging the mic here, so I'll let Antonia come in in a minute, but you said you wanted to talk a bit about like teach access. Because that's just the the European initiative is just really starting up, right? Yeah. Right. Please tell us a bit more about that for the audience that missed the one with Kate Sonta a while back.

Speaker 2: 5:32

Sure, I'd love to talk about that. Well, I've been thinking about this for a few years because it became very obvious to me that nobody really who worked at Sky Scanner had learned about accessibility during their studies, their undergraduate studies, um, computer science students or UX design students, you know, nobody is still not learning about accessibility when they're learning their craft. And to me, that's just crazy because you're learning so much where accessibility could just be embedded into a lot of the modules that you're already talking about, and it would really mean that that inclusive way of thinking, that inclusive mindset would be there from the beginning, along with the skills that you need to actually build accessible products. But I just thought, God, it's it's such a waste, and it would be such an easy thing to insert. It turns out it's not such an easy thing to insert. But anyway, I started a couple of years ago, started talking to universities, local universities, Edinburgh University is just round the corner from our Edinburgh office, made some connections, and now I lecture there and at St Andrews University and Strathclyde University, so still very local to Scotland. But then when I heard about teach access, I thought, well, you know, that is that's the answer. And it's been so it's been running, Teach Access USA has been running in in America for I think about well since 2016. And they have helped so many students learn about accessibility by providing a ton of resources to teaching staff and actually helping the teaching staff incorporate accessibility into their teaching. So I think it's very challenging for a lot of lecturers who haven't learned about accessibility themselves. How do they then incorporate it? How do they then mark papers about accessibility? It can be very challenging. So there's a ton of free resources there. And it's a very small organization, teach access. I think there's four or five of them, but they're reaching out to all of these different higher education places, universities, colleges, and really helping the lecturers, the teachers understand, and therefore the students understand. So they have now started looking at expanding what they do and bringing it to Europe. And Neil, it was lovely to see you on the call there the other day because it's so exciting. Like what can actually happen. So there are three different working groups that they are setting up just as we speak. So anyone who's interested in being involved in this, please get in touch and I can um or just get in touch directly with Kate Sonka from Teach Access and she will tell you everything you need to know. But the working group that I'm part of and that you're part of, Neil, is the the one around bringing education and industry closer together. So I think there's so much that we can do as industry to help not only support education in how they teach and what they teach, but providing that basis of we need the accessibility skills in place. And I think if industry is able to say that and get that message across, that's when things change in education. That's when courses start incorporating different curriculum. So that's yeah, that's the aim. As we're just starting off, I'm not sure exactly what we'll be doing in that working group because we'll be splitting up into smaller, smaller groups. But I am I'm so excited by it and can see huge, huge benefits of it actually happening.

Antonio Vieira Santos: 8:54

So, Ether, you have talked about some of the work that you are doing, but what actually brought you here? What motivated you to work on accessibility and define this as your career path?

Speaker 2: 9:04

Yeah, I I would never have thought it would have been. They could have asked me this seven years ago, and I would never have said that this would be my career. I think when when I just started off at Sky Scanner and I had noticed the inaccessibility of the products, firstly, that's a huge challenge. Like when you can see that there's something really needing fixed, and it's not because people don't want to do it, it's just because they don't know what they're what they're not doing or what they're doing wrong. To me, that was a big challenge that I wanted to take on. But in those early months after I'd started talking to people about it, Addy Latif got in touch with SkyScanner. I'm sure you guys know Addy. So for those who don't know, he's he's a blind accessibility consultant. He actually now works with us a lot. Um, he does a lot of user testing for us and consultancy work with us. He's fantastic. I hadn't met him at this point, and he emailed Skyscanner to say, Sky Scanner, I want to give you my money, but I can't because I can't use you. And this was really hard-hitting. And I spoke to him. I met him and we spoke, and he is just fantastic, as you know. And yes, he is his whole family are fantastic. Amar, his brother, hosts a lot of TV shows and runs a company called Travel Eyes for Blind Travelers. And Sam, Sam Latif is his sister, who's an accessibility accessibility leader at Procter and Gamble. Amazing family. And so Addy and I chatted a lot. He came in, talked to our one of our senior leaders actually, and a group of us who were very interested. And it just got us really motivated. I hate injustice. I hate it. And especially when there's an easy-ish fix for it. And I think that was just what really spurred me on. And of course, the more you get involved in it, the more fascinating the subject is. It's such a such a rewarding place to work in the field of accessibility. I have met the most amazing people through this job that I and I many of them I call my friends now. So it's it's a real, yeah, a community thing that I will never give up.

Antonio Vieira Santos: 11:13

So from that initial Slack message that you send to today, do you say that you have a community and you are not alone in your work?

Speaker 2: 11:22

Absolutely, yes. I was very much alone at the very beginning. And then, yes, when I met all of those amazing people, realized not alone at all. So that really formed our champions, our accessibility champions network. It was a very informal thing for the first few years. We would just meet up on a monthly basis and people would do things that they felt were the right things to do. We would talk about actions that people could do, and we would have a little bit of a strategy going on in the background. And that has become more formal now. So people to join the network, people now have to do some training internally, and then they have a one-to-one with me, and we talk about what they might what else they might want to learn or what activity they might want to do. That conversation is a fantastic thing to have because I can put people together at that point. Maybe someone's already working on something, and I can add that person to their group or whatever that is. So yeah, we have a really amazing community within Sky Scanner. And also, so there's not just me working on accessibility full-time. We now have a lead accessibility engineer, um, Gertjan Verkotteren. He is Belgian, but he he actually lives in China, so he's he works out of our China office. So that's been fantastic because he's able to lead the more technical side of accessibility. We work with a couple of freelancers as well, and yeah, we have we have a really good group internally. And then externally, we've got, as as Neil said in the introduction, we've got the Champions of Accessibility Network, which is Cannes for short. And that's a group of like-minded people working in accessibility in whatever form, coming together once a month for an online meetup on varying topics. And that group is fantastic. So we we try and do some face-to-face in-person meetups as well. And they're just, yeah, just such a great bunch. So we've um we do have a link that we can maybe share for that LinkedIn group. You you just request to join, and then there's a form if you want to fill out your email address, then you that puts you onto the mailing list for the online meetups and anything in person that's happening in your area. But we nearly we have nearly 3,000 members on there from all over the world, which is great. And it just adds, yeah, there's so much great chat that happens at the meetups. It's it's great. It's all very, very informal. It's a very supportive community. No one's trying to sell anything to anyone. It's not like that at all. It's it's more um helping each other out where we can.

Speaker 1: 13:44

I think that's the thing I really love about the accessibility community. And it's the thing that I I also initially loved about social media and social networks. And I think the LinkedIn groups still have some of that. No, it's not political, it's not necessarily the groups are not commercialized. LinkedIn is highly commercial. Don't don't get me wrong. You know, I get enough sales pitches in my DMs from PDF accessibility vendors and stuff. But but I think that that that peer support is really important. And I was smiling before when you said the Slack channel was was pretty quiet. It's like that's my favorite kind of Slack channel because I find Slack totally overwhelming. But of course you you need to bring the community together.

Speaker 2: 14:25

Yeah. That do you know that Slack channel had 70 people in it when I joined, which actually feels quite a lot from you know, because nothing really happening. But now there's over 500. So it's like, yeah, this is this is good.

Speaker 1: 14:37

No, no, no, that's that's that's great. And I know that when in my previous job we had a a champions network and we also formalized the process. We had tiers, and so you like the first one's really easy, you know, you make some kind of commitment and then you take some courses and you can get badges and then you can work your way up and you start becoming acquiring more skills, becoming more expert uh as as you go along. And and I think that some people will only ever want to be champions and advocates. They like their job. Not everybody has to become an accessibility specialist. And I think that this is the the importance of something like teach access, for example, where they're they're teaching accessibility skills in mainstream tech roles. Right, and this is something that I also have been interested in. When I was doing work with the Institute of Coding, which is a consortium of universities, they were doing lots of short courses to introduce people to tech. And I was really pushing for them to include accessibility into the the teaching there. And we had some success, but as you say, getting universities to change how and what they teach is actually a a lot tougher than you would think. You know, that the pedagogy is uh, you know, a thorny issue, and there there are some universities are very fixed in their ways about how they deliver learning and how they deliver content and how they assess that. I think that that that things are changing. There is a recognition that that that different types of learning still have validity, so you get modular degrees and stuff like this.

Speaker 2: 16:12

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 16:13

So I think that those are all really useful because as people acquire tech skills, we want the accessibility to be embedded. And then on the other hand, you still want to be able to teach deep accessibility skills as well, which is where things like the accessibility apprenticeships come in.

Speaker 2: 16:29

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 16:30

Because you have your accessibility aware championing generalists, and then you they need to have someone to go to, like your colleague that's based out of China, that can give them the deep advice that they need to be able to carry out that work.

Speaker 2: 16:45

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 16:46

And and it's trying to join the dot. So I was really glad when Kate said that that the intent was to come into Europe and and that was announced at TechShare Pro. I think it's really important to get both sides aligned there.

Speaker 2: 17:00

I think it'll take a while as well to get, you know, to achieve the the full goals of getting it embedded into certain courses the way that I imagine would be a wonderful way to do it. So I think for anyone listening who is an accessibility specialist and would like to get more involved with universities are teaching, it's just about reaching out to local places to see if there's anything you can do. And I think anyone who actually teaches in anything to do with UX or anything to do with computer science will welcome you. And that's that's how I've felt reaching out myself. People have wanted me to come in and they've loved just having someone from industry coming in and talking about the importance of accessibility, how we tackle it at skyscanner, what engineers have to do, what designers do in an ideal world. And it's just, I think they they really do appreciate it. And even just very briefly on something else we're doing, rather than just even light tuning, if that's if that's not people's bag, but we're working with St Andrews University on a project that we've been working with them for three years. So every third-year cohort of computer science students, they do a project, they do a group project in third year. And it's always been to build some type of either a website or an app or something about something interesting. And accessibility has been a kind of okay, and now make it accessible. So that's where I've been involved. This year, accessibility has been the core focus of the whole project. So we've got 120 students learning about accessibility deeply, going off and researching it themselves. They're hearing from our disabled testing panel, that's a group of six people with different types of disability and how they use technology and barriers they face. These kids are learning so much during their undergraduate degree, and that is fantastic. Now, that's not going to be able to happen everywhere, but I feel very, very lucky that St. Andrews are seeing it as important enough to actually put that amount of time into it. It's it's been phenomenal. So we're working but worked worked with them all of last semester, and we'll work with them all of this semester, and we'll be reviewing demos at the end of the yeah, it's fab. So they're they're building um accessibility testing tools is the focus of this one.

Speaker 1: 19:08

Yeah, that's that's fantastic. And I think that accessibility is quite contagious or the enthusiasm for once once you've got the bug, you want to evangelize, you know, be that champion. And so what you've got there is 20 new nodes in your network that are going to then connect. Yeah, sorry, 120 new nodes in your network. Yeah. So, you know, it's those kind of actions that, yes, you said before, it's going to take time. It takes years. But what we're talking about here is making systemic changes. And systemic changes don't come about quickly. They they might reach a tipping point where it seems like something's quick, but it takes years in the incubation. So I think that you know, the work that you do is really important.

Speaker 2: 19:50

Antonin Can I just tell you one last story that's uh about that? It's just lovely. Um at Edinburgh University we run an award called the Sky Scanner Accessibility and Inclusion Award. And And this is the third year, I'm gonna say actually, it might even be just be the second year. Maybe it's just the second year that we've run it. So it's uh it's for final year students whose dissertation solves some kind of accessibility-related problem. So we have a lot of submissions come through, and we have a judging panel within Skyscanner, and the winner this year is a lovely girl called Aishi, who'd built an online platform to help dyslexic students learn more effectively during lecture time. And it was a beautifully built, very considered, very accessible platform. We loved it. She won the prize and we gave we awarded that at graduation, and it was all very lovely. She just got onto our graduate programme. So I just I just saw her in in the office the other day. I was like, ah, this is so exciting. So we don't take on many graduates in January. Most of them come in July, I think. But it was this was fantastic. So it's kind of a lovely full circle story that so she's joined our program, she'll be doing that for um 18 months and then hopefully um staying with us and and working. Fabulous.

Antonio Vieira Santos: 21:03

I think that that's a very interesting way of getting out there and bringing the topic to an audience that usually would never get in touch with the topic of accessibility because we know that accessibility conferences are full of accessibility professionals who know who know themselves very well, their friends. But it's important is when we talk about accessibility at technology events in places that usually is not on on stage. And that leads me to my question. How can we talk about accessibility outside the usual places? There are plenty of technology events in UK, in Europe. So how can we talk about it outside the places where all know the faces in the room?

Speaker 2: 21:48

Yeah, that is the challenge. So we have done a little bit of that in the past where there have been travel conferences or things that happen over a number of days. A lot of people from the travel industry will be there, and we have tried to get involved talking about accessibility in those forums, and people are interested. People are interested. It's becoming more and more talked about across digital accessibility. It's becoming more and more talked about. Obviously, physical accessibility is a huge factor within the travel industry and it has been talked about for years, but the digital element is a newer discussion point. So I think it's it's just meeting people where they are, not confusing them too much with loads of technical details, and actually showing people how barriers within their digital spaces can truly affect someone's journey through that, through that experience. And that's what I was would always say to anyone who's who's starting out, say, trying to get a program running in in their business or trying to convince leadership that this is a worthwhile thing is actually get a couple of disabled, differently disabled people using the site or the app, show them, show them how people can struggle. Because until you actually see it for real, I think it's quite hard to imagine. So I guess keeping it real like that, making it very relatable and trying to talk about it in as many different forums as possible. But you're so right, Antonio. Like we we all need to get out there and talk more in places that are not surrounded by other accessibility people. Because so many people, so many other people still are not aware that it even exists.

Speaker 1: 23:24

So I'm glad that you're taking it out to the sort of the the sort of technology community. One of the things that I'm trying to do, I I mean, I do go to the tech community as well, but one of the things that I'm trying to do now, my target group is management schools and business schools. Because I what I want to get to is the people that are holding the purse strings and making the decisions about uh how businesses are run so that that it can get start being embedded into management frameworks because then when your technologist comes knocking on the door of the CEO or the CFO or the director of a company, it's not going to be an aid-in concept to them anymore because it's something that's also taught there. So I think that we need to take this sort of multi-pronged approach to sort of addressing the interest groups and and how you address that to different areas of society and business. And of course, going to be different. But I think that one of the things that I've done over the last 10 to 15 years is really sort of examine how you can start embedding that in business processes and the way that and the sort of psychology of management. And I think that it's an area that fascinates me still. And I think that that that there's some mileage to be made in that area as well. So I'm I'm going to be sort of zoning in on sort of management teaching and and maybe sort of pop management writing and stuff like this to try and get into the minds of some of the leaders. Because there are some great business leaders that have you know really understood the topic and that are out there talking about it. So for example, you've got Paul Pullman, he used to run Unilever, not a small organization. He wrote he wrote a book called Net Positive, right? Now that that is a is a is a good read for a start. It's a really good book about how businesses can have a positive impact on the world and and the environment and and so on, but also and be disability inclusive because he's he is the original chair of Fatible 500. So I think that framing stuff in the language of business leadership is also something that we need to do as we want to take ourselves out of that bubble. So I I hope that that teach access and other things over time go from well, what do we need to teach people in tech roles to actually what are the roles that accessibility awareness needs to be embedded in across a whole suite of different areas. We're not just teaching it in a sort of uh sort of tower all on its own.

Antonio Vieira Santos: 26:04

You were mentioned Paul Pullman, but something that we need we also need more CEOs who are in active roles to talk more about accessibility. And it's extremely rare, extremely rare to have a post from the senior executive to organically write or post any content about about accessibility or even mention the word disability. You know, they're almost count by my fingers the number of posts that I saw uh written by by executives.

Speaker 1: 26:31

Yeah. And less now because of the political climate, but all the more reason to engage with them.

Speaker 2: 26:35

Yes, agreed.

Speaker 1: 26:36

Right. We've reached the end of our half hour. It's been great fun. Thank you very much, uh Heather. So let's remind people, you can go on LinkedIn and you can search for the Champions of Accessibility Network and you can or you can search for Heather on on LinkedIn and find the Champions of Accessibility Network there. You can also find out about Teach Access both on LinkedIn and I think it's teachaccess.org. Let me just check that.

Speaker 2: 27:07

Yes. Maybe forward slash Europe.org.

Speaker 1: 27:10

Yes, okay. He says he's busy typing, right? There we go. Forward slash Europe. Okay. And get involved. And finally, I need to thank our friends at Amazon for sponsoring us and keeping us on air. Thank you.