Focus on the people that make things happen

I’ve written about how, in my half-decade at one of the UK’s biggest tech companies, I approached creating a culture of accessibility. Broadly speaking, there are two ways to do it:

Top-down

Bottom-up

Both are important, but one is vital.

Top-down approach

Getting buy-in and agreement from the top sounds like the easiest approach since there are far fewer people ‘up there’ in the most senior levels of company leadership (executives, EVPs).

You may be lucky and have a strong ally at board level, but if not it is very, very tough. Reaching them through layers of middle management and getting past gatekeepers is a job, and once you have their attention, their time and patience are limited. They respond well to numbers and clear risk, but this is not always easy, especially in the UK and Europe where example landmark court cases are few and far between.

It takes time and tactics to work on executives, especially in larger organisations; particularly now, with AI dominating executive priorities.

Bottom-up approach

While you’re working on the execs, your day-to-day focus should be on the people ‘on the ground’ who are doing the actual designing and building.

This pool of people is much, much bigger so the number of people with enthusiasm for accessibility will be high. Of course each person’s ‘clout’ is less than those at the top but there is strength in numbers.

One quote that has always stayed with me is from Mike Monteiro in his talk How Designers Destroyed the World:

Every time you make a conscious choice … rather than just letting things happen or accepting what is handed to you by others … you are fulfilling your responsibility

If you don’t think you’ve got the power to make your product more accessible, channel your inner Mike Monteiro and know you can make a difference:

Researchers can push for a more representative, inclusive panel of users to test with

Designers can consider the components and patterns they reach for from a different perspective to their own

Developers can really dig into HTML and ARIA to ensure they’re writing accessible code, as well as get a feel for keyboard-only usage and screen reader software

Testers can put pressure on their product owner to fix accessibility issues before considering work ‘done’, and for issues found in existing UI, raise bugs and push to get them fixed

Enthusiasm, advocacy, and knowledge sharing gradually spread upwards through product owners and product managers, until senior management has no option but to fall in line with what’s happening on the front lines.

Buy-in from the top makes things easier, but isn’t a prerequisite for building accessible digital products. The people who do are the ones that make the difference.