Aligning Accessibility with What Already Matters

Every company has its own personality. It might be obsessed with speed, driven by design, led by customer feedback, or focused on data. The identity shapes how decisions get made—and if you want accessibility to last, it has to fit right in.

I’ve seen accessibility efforts succeed (and survive) by aligning with the values that already exist inside the business, not working against them.

Start with What the Company Already Cares About

When I was at Yahoo, everything was about innovation. Teams were building wild, interactive, often cutting-edge experiences. So our job wasn’t to slow things down—it was to give developers the tools to do those things accessibly. We embedded accessibility into the frameworks and front-end patterns they were already excited to use.

At Intuit, the focus was on customer delight. That meant we had to understand what our customers with disabilities actually needed and then help teams improve usability and trust. We weren’t trying to insert new goals. We were helping the company meet its goals for more people.

Every organization already has something it obsesses over: performance, user trust, brand consistency, international expansion, risk management. Accessibility can amplify any of those priorities—but only if you’re listening closely enough to understand what matters most.

Real-World Examples

• TikTok is fueled by metrics and engagement. The accessibility team focuses on supporting the accessibility settings already present on a user’s device—things like font size and contrast—so users could engage longer, more comfortably, and without friction.
• Shopify builds for trust. Accessibility showed up in how they built developer tooling, documented standards, and supported merchants. It was never “extra.” It was a pillar of a good user experience.
• In government and healthcare, compliance is king. Accessibility teams win when they help document, audit, and report progress—while also improving how people actually use the service.
• Performance-focused orgs already value error counts and latency. Accessibility fits right in when framed as a quality measure. Fewer bugs, faster pages, better user retention.

Help People Do Their Jobs Better

When accessibility is presented as a rulebook or checklist, people resist. When it’s framed as a way to improve the work they’re already doing, they lean in. That’s why we need to talk about accessibility the same way we talk about product excellence, brand trust, or operational efficiency. Because accessibility isn’t a separate goal—it’s a multiplier.

Accessibility makes good products better. It opens your design system to more users. It reduces support calls. It strengthens security, usability, and user trust. And if you’re in a values-led company, it’s a direct expression of your mission.

Build Relationships, Not Silos

Accessibility is everybody’s job—but nobody’s first job. That means part of your role is connecting the dots:

• Work with design to build patterns that are usable out of the box.
• Partner with engineering to reduce regressions and make accessibility part of code quality.
• Talk to PMs about risk, customer metrics, and retention.
• Help support understand how accessibility fixes reduce tickets and increase satisfaction.
• Bring legal and compliance into the loop so they’re allies, not roadblocks.

Speak their language. Use their dashboards. Make it feel familiar.

Borrow What Already Works

Accessibility doesn’t have to invent a new playbook. Just look around at how other priorities—like security, localization, or performance—are managed:

• They use dashboards.
• They set measurable standards.
• They build training and documentation.
• They automate where possible.
• They invest in champions and internal communities.

Accessibility can (and should) do the same. The secret isn’t inventing new workflows—it’s plugging into the workflows people already trust.

Don’t Copy, Translate

It’s tempting to borrow what worked at another company. But culture isn’t copy/paste.

At a startup, you might tie accessibility to product velocity and design iteration. At a regulated enterprise, you might lead with risk reduction and documentation. At a nonprofit, it might be all about values and equity.

The message and the method have to flex. But the principle stays the same: align with what already matters.

You don’t need to convince your company to care about accessibility. You just need to show how accessibility helps them do what they already care about—even better. That’s how accessibility becomes something that lasts—not because it’s forced in, but because it fits.

[This article was written with AI assistance]