If the accessibility team isn’t in the room, who steps up?
This is my call to action for all product owners, sales teams, engineering, design, and UX organizations. Every decision you make can either open doors or create barriers for your users with disabilities. You may be shooting yourself in the foot when you kick the accessibility can down the road. The biggest cost of getting sued over inaccessibility isn’t the financial price of legal fees and settlement agreements, it’s the opportunity cost of having to shift your entire team over to fixing something that would have been much faster and cheaper to do correctly from the beginning.
Product Owners: You set the roadmap. If accessibility isn’t prioritized, essential inclusion features will be overlooked. Speak up to ensure that accessibility is considered from the start. Put accessibility in your definition of done.
Sales Teams: You’re the bridge between users and products. When accessibility is part of your pitch, you’re not just selling a product—you’re advocating for a commitment to all customers. It’s about expanding market reach and honoring diverse needs. Track the value of all opportunities you haven’t been able to bid on because your VPAT is either non-existent or 50 % full of “partially supports” and “does not support” values.
Engineers: You’re building the experience. Small choices, like adding alt text or making buttons keyboard accessible, create big impacts. Even when no one is watching, making accessible code a standard changes lives.
Design: It all starts with you. You can’t treat accessibility like just another feature to tack on. Accessibility is more like plumbing—it’s foundational. When accessibility is missing or poorly done, fixing it means tearing through layers of code and doing intense refactoring. It’s much easier and more effective when accessibility is built into the product from the start. Pick accessible colors and write accessibility briefs for your developers to follow.
UX: You own the user story and execute the research. Are you making sure disabled customer’s needs are represented?
There are usually only 1 to 3 accessibility engineers for every thousand product owners, sales teams, engineers, design, and UX staff. The accessibility team can’t be in every room where decisions that affect accessibility are being made. When this happens, it’s up to non-accessibility team members to make sure accessibility is represented. Accessibility is everyone’s job, every day.
Alt: Four persons seated on chairs focusing on product, sales, engineering and the last person on accessibility excluded and seated alone.