Building Accessible Digital Experiences
Lessons learned championing WCAG 2.1 AA compliance at TBC Corporation. Why accessibility isn't optional and how to make it part of your product DNA.
Accessibility is not a feature. It's not a nice-to-have. It's a fundamental requirement for building products that serve all users, and it's also the law in many jurisdictions.
When I began championing accessibility at TBC Corporation, I encountered resistance. 'Our users don't have disabilities,' some said. (Wrong—about 15% of the global population has some form of disability.) 'It's too expensive to retrofit,' others argued. (Also wrong—it's far more expensive to rebuild inaccessible products or face legal action.)
The turning point came when we did user research with customers who used assistive technologies. Watching someone struggle to navigate our website with a screen reader—or worse, give up entirely—was a wake-up call for the entire organization.
We established WCAG 2.1 AA as our minimum standard. This meant ensuring sufficient color contrast, keyboard navigability, proper heading structure, alternative text for images, and many other technical requirements. But accessibility is more than checking boxes on a compliance list.
True accessibility means designing with diverse abilities in mind from the start. It means testing with real users who have disabilities. It means understanding that accessibility improvements often benefit everyone—clear navigation, readable text, and logical flow make experiences better for all users.
We integrated accessibility into our design system, created checklists for developers, and made it part of our definition of done. No feature shipped without passing accessibility tests. This shifted accessibility from an afterthought to a core product requirement.
One of my proudest achievements was seeing accessibility become ingrained in our culture. Designers started considering screen reader users in their mockups. Engineers knew to use semantic HTML. Product managers understood that serving users with disabilities wasn't charity—it was good business and the right thing to do.
If your product isn't accessible, you're excluding millions of potential users and exposing your organization to risk. More importantly, you're failing to live up to the responsibility we have as builders of digital experiences to create products that work for everyone.