Over January and February, I had office hours conversations with people leading accessibility inside their organizations. Enterprise practitioners and leaders. Agency principals. Higher ed coordinators. Some have been doing this for years. Some just got handed the work.

I told you I was doing research interviews to better understand perspective. That’s true, but honestly, I got so much more from the conversations than I expected.

I invited people dealing with strategy, influence, and programs that feel “stuck.” What surprised me most was how the same three challenges came up in every single conversation.

3 findings and a reflection.

Everyone (and I do mean that literally…) had absolutely no problem at all describing friction points for accessibility work inside their organization. They almost all fell into these three categories:

1. Teams are WAY over capacity.

Accessibility shows up as “extra” work on top of what they’re already doing, not as work that’s integrated into what they’re already doing. The immediate reaction from teams when they are pushed by product leaders or others to add anything to their plate: “I don’t have the bandwidth.”

And it’s not just accessibility teams. It’s ALL the teams, regardless of role. When ANYTHING perceived as “additional” comes along, the default is no.

Everyone wants everybody to do something else, something different, or something more. Is it any wonder the software industry and others are pursuing AI at massive scale? One of AI’s promises is a large-scale response to what has been demanded for years: MORE.

2. Some of the best successes are accidental

One practitioner told me some of their best wins happen “when somebody else builds this into their goals but they didn’t know they were going to.” That immediately resonated with me… I’m sure you can think of experiences you’ve had where success was achieved through accidental ownership.

Accidental successes are to be celebrated when they happen. They are unreliable as a long-term strategy though :)

3. Many of us are operating as solo practitioners at massive scale.

Over and over I heard one phrase of significant concern.

“Team of one.”

It’s a recipe for rapid burnout. One person in a company of 100,000+. A single de facto expert for an entire college campus. Even some Fortune 500 companies structure this as a solo role with no positional authority.

And you see it on all those job ads circulating for accessibility that are looking for a true unicorn. It’s burnout city before you even interview for the position. (I’ll happily share some burnout stories if you want to hear them… after a year of therapy, I’m over it, I swear!)

I loved capturing these thoughts from the conversations. Here’s where it took me…

The Reflection

We should learn from those accidental success – what were the conditions that brought them about, and how can we create them again?

My experiences have showed me that those accidents are successes for a few reasons:

1. The customer was right.
2. The timing was right.
3. The leader was right.

On customers

This happens a lot more than anyone is willing to talk about in the private sector. When the right customer asks “Why isn’t your software meeting our accessibility requirements?” the right things happen pretty quickly at your organization… particularly if you’re a sales-driven org. This is simplest path to showing how accessibility impacts the bottom line.

On getting the timing right

There’s a lot to be said for making your accessibility goals deeply connected to someone else’s goals… it’s a means to create shared success. And that often comes from identifying the “right” initiative in another part of the organization. What area is getting attention and funding in your organization/company?

For example - Engineering productivity. Shipping inaccessible product means more rework and revisiting the same code and implementation later. Tools that help make engineers more productive and delivering higher when shipping is a win for the entire organization. And very clearly, accessibility debt is a big hit on dev productivity - nobody wants to do re-work.

If it isn’t engineering productivity, what is it at your organization? Is it Student Autonomy? Citizen self-service? Figure it out, and connect the dots.

On the right leaders

Building relationships with others in your organization is a reality if you want to success at the highest levels. Know who has that skill? The leadership/executive team. They have relationships that get you into the planning cadence in their group. They can identify what goals are being bubbled up as priorities in other parts of the company. They’re the ones that help push back when someone wants to release something that isn’t accessible.

Ask yourself who are the right leaders in your organization to align with? The value of the right relationships is most often underestimated. (more to come on that in future writings)

What's next?

I’m still not done chewing on all the richness in those conversations. There’s a lot more to work through.

Next message I’ll go deeper on one of these. Reply and tell me which: the capacity problem, making accidental success repeatable, the team-of-one reality, or something else you want me to unpack.

Derek