Purple Tuesday is an annual event that showcases and celebrates the value of customers with disabilities and neurodiverse conditions. Every year, businesses are encouraged to make a commitment towards improving their customer experience so that their websites, stores and business ventures are accessible to everyone. This could be anything from a site audit on website accessibility, to teaching employees how to use British Sign Language.

This year, we are celebrating Purple Tuesday by reflecting on the work we have done over the past 12 months and outlining our commitments to customer accessibility for the year ahead.

Why are we supporting Purple Tuesday?

At least 1 in 5 people in the UK have a long-term illness, impairment or disability. Many more have a temporary disability.

Auto Trader’s Accessibility Working Group are passionate about making our organisation more inclusive for customers, colleagues, and our communities. We appreciate that it is our differences that make us all so unique.

Participating in Purple Tuesday means that we, along with all the other amazing organisations taking part, can commit to enhancing the customer experience for those with disabilities or neurodiverse conditions.

What is Accessibility?

Accessibility is the term used to describe whether something can be used by people of all abilities and disabilities. For example, a website is accessible if all people, including disabled, elderly and neurodiverse people can use it.

You can learn more about accessibility by reading our post from last year.

What have we been doing?

Over the past year, we have seen an increase in the number of people within the business who have been involved in making Auto Trader a more inclusive platform to look to buy or sell a vehicle.

Here’s just a few of the things we have been doing over the past 12 months…

Making sure we consider vulnerable customers and how we can support them in their journey on our platform.

Creating our new Accessibility Working group, with people from around the business dedicating their time to make impactful changes and educate our colleagues.

Running knowledge sharing sessions with teams around the business to make sure that everyone is aware of why accessibility is important and what they can do to help out.

Building new services as accessible from inception, such as our new finance journey.

Having a central team whose focus is on how to improve accessibility at Auto Trader, from the marketing material we create, to the journeys we build to help customers find vehicles to buy.

Our commitments for the year ahead

If you’re familiar with our commitments from 2020 you’ll notice that they are staying the same for the year ahead. We see accessibility as a journey of continuous improvement and although we have accomplished a lot in the past year, there is still a lot of work to be done.

Over the next year we commit to:

• Widening knowledge about accessibility across the business by providing knowledge sharing sessions and training for all Auto Trader employees.
• Working towards creating a more accessible experience for all customers, colleagues and consumers.
• Encouraging our teams to create new products as accessible from inception
• Including a more diverse audience when conducting user research and product testing in an inclusive way