Our team identified a critical gap in our product suite: our lack of accessibility compliance was creating barriers for users with disabilities and limiting our market potential. Specifically, we recognized that our survey tool, Questions, wasn't meeting WCAG 2.1 AA standards, which meant we were excluding users with accessibility needs and potentially missing out on customers who required compliant tools.

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We took collective ownership of this challenge by partnering with accessibility consultants to conduct a comprehensive audit of our most-used product. Rather than applying surface-level fixes, our team championed a complete rebuild of our core components using an accessibility-first approach. This wasn't just about compliance—we saw an opportunity to establish organization-wide accessibility processes that would prevent these issues in the future.

Our collaborative work resulted in successfully achieving AA compliance, but we didn't stop there. We validated the real-world usability of our improvements by conducting testing with users from Blind Low Vision NZ, ensuring our solution actually worked for the people we were trying to serve. This validation step was crucial to our team because technical compliance doesn't always translate to genuine usability.

Through this project, we not only solved our immediate accessibility challenges but also positioned our organization to be more inclusive and competitive in markets that require accessibility compliance.

This version maintains the strategic thinking and user-centered approach while emphasizing the team's collective effort and shared ownership of the challenge.

Recognizing that our internal team needed specialized expertise, we initiated a partnership with accessibility consultants to conduct a thorough WCAG 2.1 compliance audit. Our team participated actively in user testing sessions and expert evaluations to understand the real impact of our accessibility gaps.

Through our collaborative research, we uncovered several critical insights that shaped our approach:

• We confirmed that our in-house accessibility knowledge needed to be supplemented with external expertise for the level of improvements we wanted to achieve
• Our team discovered that visual designs could appear perfectly functional but completely fail accessibility standards when implemented
• We determined together that taking a component-level approach would be the most scalable way to create organization-wide impact
• Our audit revealed critical issues that required immediate team attention to achieve AA compliance

The specific pain points we documented included poor keyboard navigation, missing ARIA labels, inadequate color contrast, and completely inaccessible form controls—issues that were creating real barriers for users with disabilities.

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Rather than trying to tackle everything at once, our team made the strategic decision to focus on Questions, our survey tool, as it was our most-used product.

Our thinking was that by demonstrating successful accessibility improvements here, we could establish proven processes and build organizational confidence for broader application across our entire product suite.

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Our team immersed ourselves in established accessibility resources, drawing heavily from the UK Government Design System and W3C Accessibility Pattern Library. This collaborative research informed our approach and ensured we were building on proven best practices rather than inventing solutions from scratch.

Our team evaluated existing design system components against accessibility standards and collectively made the strategic decision to rebuild from scratch rather than retrofit. This approach ensured we could create scalable accessibility improvements across the entire product suite.

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Working together, we created new design system components with an accessibility-first approach. Our design and development team focused on building proper semantic structure, intuitive keyboard navigation patterns, and comprehensive screen reader compatibility.

We leveraged established patterns from government and W3C accessibility libraries as a foundation, ensuring we maintained visual consistency while prioritizing functional accessibility for all users.

Our process shifted from traditional siloed work to close collaboration between designers and front-end engineers.

Together, we focused on critical implementation details:

• We mapped out proper tab order and keyboard navigation flows as a team
• Our developers and designers worked together to ensure correct ARIA labeling and semantic markup
• We collaborated on component state management to work seamlessly with assistive technologies
• Our team conducted regular screen reader testing and optimization sessions together

This collaborative approach ensured that accessibility considerations were embedded throughout our design and development process, rather than being an afterthought.

Our team worked closely with accessibility consultants to conduct a comprehensive professional WCAG 2.1 audit. We scoped this evaluation to cover our full product against AA compliance standards, and together we identified critical accessibility barriers and prioritized our remediation efforts based on impact and feasibility.

Throughout development, our team maintained an iterative testing approach, conducting continuous screen reader and keyboard navigation testing to catch issues early and ensure our improvements were working as intended.

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We organized user testing sessions with members of Blind Low Vision NZ, working directly with users who had visual impairments and extensive screen reader experience. Our team wanted to ensure that our technical compliance translated into real-world usability.

The feedback from these sessions was encouraging: we found that almost all question types achieved high usability, and the remaining issues had clear, actionable fixes that our team could implement. Most importantly, we validated that our accessibility improvements were creating genuinely usable experiences for the people we were designing for.

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As a team, we achieved several key outcomes:

• Successfully reached WCAG 2.1 AA compliance across the product
• Demonstrated strong user task completion rates when using assistive technologies
• Saw a significant reduction in accessibility-related support requests, indicating our improvements were working in practice

Together, our team delivered a comprehensive accessibility transformation:

• Rebuilt component library - We reconstructed our entire component system with semantic HTML structure and proper ARIA labeling
• Intuitive keyboard navigation - Our team designed logical tab order flows and implemented clear focus indicators throughout the interface
• Optimized screen reader experience - We created descriptive labels and meaningful state announcements that work seamlessly with assistive technologies
• Universal interaction patterns - Our solution works consistently across multiple assistive technologies, ensuring broad accessibility

The collaborative effort produced significant outcomes across multiple dimensions:

• User impact - Our survey tool is now fully usable by people with visual impairments and motor disabilities, opening up new possibilities for inclusive research
• Business impact - We expanded our market reach to include organizations serving disabled communities, creating new revenue opportunities
• Compliance achievement - Our team successfully met WCAG 2.1 AA standards across all question types, ensuring legal compliance and market access
• Team capability - Through this project, we upskilled our entire design and development team in accessibility best practices, creating lasting organizational capability

This project demonstrated that when we prioritize accessibility from the ground up, we create better experiences for everyone while building a more inclusive and competitive product.