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Accessibility Specialist

Building a lasting accessibility strategy: Part 2

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In part 1, we looked at how to get started by defining your goals, building a plan and getting leadership buy-in.

With leadership on board and a plan in place, the next step is embedding accessibility into your organisation's culture. Real success doesn't just come from checklists or audits - it comes from people. In this post, we'll look at how to get everyone on board, raise awareness, find allies, build a champions network, and provide the education and resources teams need.

To keep things simple, I'll keep using the word “website” as a stand-in for digital products, services, platforms, and apps.

Getting everyone on board

Accessibility can't sit on one person's shoulders. It works best when everyone - designers, developers, testers, product managers, and leadership - sees it as part of their role. It should be part of your team's mindset, not an afterthought.

In my experience, understanding varies hugely from person to person, ranging from zero awareness to deep expertise. The challenge is that accessibility can be complex, subjective, and often not covered in typical design or development courses.

The tricky part is that awareness levels vary a lot. Some people have never heard of accessibility beyond “screen reader stuff”. Add to that the fact that accessibility can feel complicated and isn't always taught in design or development courses, and it's easy to see why it gets overlooked.

Accessibility? That's aria labels and screen reader stuff right?

— Anonymous developer

The biggest barriers I usually see are:

  • Lack of understanding of its importance and impact
  • Limited knowledge, training, resources, and documentation
  • Difficulty getting user feedback from real people with disabilities

Knowledge and awareness are important, but embedding accessibility requires cultural support too. Culture change takes time and effort, but when people feel engaged and passionate, the impact is huge. Tying accessibility into existing initiatives, like DEI programs, can also help build momentum.

Raising awareness

If awareness is low, interactive and engaging activities can make a big difference:

  • Lunch and learn: short sessions focused on one topic. For example, keyboard accessibility - before the session, find three websites with known keyboard issues, then challenge attendees to complete tasks using only their keyboard. Discuss what they found frustrating and why it matters.
  • Lived experience speakers: invite people to share first-hand accounts of living with disabilities and how accessibility impacts daily life.
  • Empathy labs: designed to help participants understand and, to some extent, experience the challenges people with disabilities face when using digital products and the web. These labs often use personas and simulation equipment to demonstrate what it's like to navigate with different impairments or assistive technologies. While valuable for building empathy, they should never replace testing with real users who have disabilities.

Even a short video can make a big impact when it comes to raising awareness. One of my favourites, which I often share in accessibility training, comes from Which Magazine and AbilityNet. In it, Adi Latif, a blind digital accessibility consultant, demonstrates the challenges of booking airline tickets using a screen reader.

Finding allies

Many teams already have people who are passionate about accessibility or disability rights (often because of personal experiences), even if they aren't yet familiar with accessibility or technical requirements. Find those allies and encourage them to:

  • Asking accessibility questions
  • Celebrating accessibility wins
  • Sharing user feedback
  • Talking about accessibility in meetings, Slack/Teams channels, stand-ups, and retrospectives.

Culture change doesn't happen overnight, but it starts with small, consistent actions.

Accessibility champions

Once you have allies, keep the momentum going by creating an accessibility champions network. This could be as simple as a monthly catch-up to share successes, challenges, and learning, or something more structured with defined learning paths. Including a senior leader in the network increases visibility, helps remove barriers, and reinforces the importance of the work.

In my own work, I started a champions network with a two-hour session every other month: the first hour was training on a topic chosen by attendees, and the second was an open discussion. This mix of learning and sharing gave champions the confidence to become the go-to accessibility contacts in their teams.

Resources on building a champions network:

Education and resources

Awareness is important, but people also need practical knowledge. If your team doesn't know how to build accessible things, they won't. I've had great success tackling this through:

  • Accessibility training for new starters
  • Role-specific training (e.g. for designers, developers, testers)
  • Regular refresher sessions (e.g. quarterly)
  • Internal guides and knowledge base
  • Dedicated Slack/Teams accessiblity channel for questions, discussions and sharing

Internal resource center

An internal accessibility resource center can be incredibly powerful for sharing consistent guidance, accessible component patterns, guides and other related content. Built well, it acts as a single source of truth for your teams and provides a simpler alternative to technical documentation like WCAG.

In my current role, we built an internal accessibility resource center that covers:

  • Internal accessibility standards: including WCAG AA, some AAA and best practices beyond WCAG
  • Accessible UI components and patterns: expected HTML, CSS, JavaScript, ARIA and keyboard interaction behaviour for components and patterns used across our platform
  • Accessible content creation: non-technical guidance for content creators
  • Testing guidance: covering light touch checks, full technical audits against WCAG and use of assistive technologies like screen readers, speech recognition and magnification
  • Relevant laws and regulations: those that apply both to the organisation and its customers

If you don't yet have the knowledge to create this internally, some organisations offer subscription-based accessibility knowledge bases, such as Deque and the TPGI ARC KnowledgeBase

Once you have a solid plan for building a culture focused on accessibility it's time to look at how accessibility can be embedded into existing processes across the full development lifecycle, which we'll cover in part 3.