Digital Accessibility Practice for Enterprise Teams

Moving from reactive fixes to an embedded accessibility practice takes more than compliance checklists. This educational hub supports accessibility practitioners in building scalable, repeatable approaches to inclusive design across digital product teams. Explore practical models for integrating accessibility into strategy, design, development, and testing, along with guidance on the people, processes, and tools that make accessibility a sustainable, organization-wide practice.

Whatis a Digital Accessibility Practice?

Digital accessibility often starts as a reactive effort to fix issues after they surface, which can leave teams stuck in a costly and inefficient cycle. Maturing into an accessibility practice means moving beyond one-off fixes and embedding accessibility into everyday processes and decision-making. It is a strategic approach that integrates inclusive design throughout the product development lifecycle, treats accessibility as a core measure of product quality, and ensures that every team member understands their role and has the knowledge, tools, and support needed to deliver accessible experiences.

Core pillars of a sustainable Digital Accessibility Practice

A practice of digital accessibility recognizes the value of standards and legal requirements in defining a baseline level of accessibility, and the opportunity accessibility brings to improve user experience for people with disabilities – and for other users as well.

User-centred, inclusive design

User-centered, inclusive design focuses on creating experiences that work for people with disabilities while treating accessibility standards as a baseline, not the finish line. It promotes inclusivity through practices like using inclusive language, supporting inclusive hiring, and selecting tools that enable accessibility. This approach involves people with disabilities throughout the product lifecycle, from requirements to usability testing, and draws on real-world stories and patterns to guide better design decisions.

Governance & Management

Governance and management provide the structure that makes accessibility a consistent, accountable practice across the organization. This includes clear ownership, defined policies and standards, and well-understood roles for accessibility champions, product teams, QA, UX, and engineering. Effective governance also establishes decision authority, escalation paths, and operational frameworks that treat accessibility as a requirement, supported by scorecards, KPIs, and integration into SDLC and procurement processes, so everyone understands responsibilities and how decisions are made.

Accessibility in design, development, and testing

Accessibility in design, development, and testing ensures that inclusive thinking is built directly into how products are created and maintained. This includes applying accessibility best practices in visual and UX design, writing accessible code during development, and using tools that support these efforts. Strong testing processes combine manual evaluation with automated tools, along with clear bug management and documentation practices. Teams also report on product accessibility and provide support for users affected by accessibility issues, making accessibility part of the full product lifecycle.

Building knowledge and skills

Building knowledge and skills ensures accessibility can be sustained and scaled across teams. This includes ongoing training and role-specific learning paths for UX, engineering, and QA, along with a shared language that helps practitioners and product teams collaborate effectively. Accessibility is reinforced through integration into design systems, style guides, code libraries, and documentation, and supported by models that promote distributed ownership and shared responsibility across the organization.

Frequently Asked Questions

If we follow a standard like the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), won’t that be enough to ensure people with disabilities can use our digital product?

WCAG helps you along the road toward better accessibility, but it’s a general standard. For your specific product, with a specific audience and a specific purpose, you need to go further. Including people with disabilities in design and development, and in task-based usability testing, helps you move from technical conformance to genuine usability – and to a more effective product.

We have a really knowledgeable accessibility specialist on our team - do we need to worry about building a practice of accessibility?

Experts are great! But an overreliance on one person for accessibility tasks usually becomes unsustainable, if they’re asked to do too much work, and this can lead to burnout or them moving to another role. When other team members step up and meet their responsibilities, the accessibility load is distributed, accessibility becomes embedded in processes, and specialists can be engaged more effectively on more complex tasks.

Won’t including accessibility throughout our design and development lifecycle slow us down?

There are many ways to integrate accessibility into agile development processes, allowing you to get rapid feedback early on rather than waiting for a comprehensive audit. Strategic use of tools can help automate some accessibility tasks, and when your team all has accessibility knowledge and skills, designing and developing with accessibility in mind becomes a standard process rather than an extra task that needs time and budget.

How does accessibility help us be innovative when we have to focus on complying with standards?

Accessibility is a great driver for innovation – by thinking about a more diverse set of user needs, you naturally become more creative in exploring effective solutions. Standards and guidelines help point you in the right direction but a practice of accessibility helps ensure you have scope for creating engaging and effective digital solutions.

Build a sustainable Digital Accessibility Practice

From website accessibility services to enterprise digital accessibility services, AMS gives you expert partnership, measurable results, and a program that grows with your business.