MY APPROACH

Accessibility is easy to acknowledge and easy to deprioritize. Without a shared framework, it becomes everyone's vague responsibility and no one's concrete job. At Analog Devices, there was no web accessibility strategy — so I built one.

My approach started with research, because a framework built on assumptions isn't a framework — it's a guess. I needed to understand where the organization actually stood, what real users were experiencing, and what teams needed in order to work accessibly without it feeling like extra work.

THE WORK

I came in without a map, so I made one. Rather than conduct the audit in-house, I brought in Deque — a leading accessibility consultancy — to perform an independent WCAG audit and heuristic review. Having an outside expert establish the baseline added credibility to the findings and gave us a harder-to-dismiss picture of where we stood. Stakeholder interviews rounded out the picture, surfacing organizational constraints, team dynamics, and where the biggest gaps in awareness lived.

With the research in hand, I built a comprehensive accessibility framework from the ground up — developer documentation, a testing and QA process, and training to build accessibility literacy across disciplines. The centerpiece was a set of accessibility design standards written specifically for the design team: clear, actionable, and built to fit naturally into their existing workflow.

IMPACT

The measure of a good framework isn't whether it exists — it's whether people use it. The design standards were enthusiastically adopted, which said something. Designers weren't just following the guidelines because they had to — they embraced them. Over time, teams across design and engineering began applying accessibility standards independently, without needing a researcher in the room to make the case. The strategy had become part of how people worked. That's the outcome I was most proud of: not a score on an audit, but a genuine shift in culture.