Accessibility is a system-level problem.
What does that mean? It means accessibility issues don't exist in isolation. They run pretty deep into how your organisation operates. Your processes, your culture, your tools, your standards. A wonky button isn't just a wonky button. It's a symptom of deeper issues. It means you're missing design systems, you have unclear guidelines and there's no shared knowledge between teams. Or it just means that nobody is giving enough of a shit to fix the root cause.
We can't solve a system-level problem with unit-level solutions.
I'm talking about granular solutions that are localised at the unit level and are rarely optimal for the larger organisation. For example, in an organisation with multiple product teams and multiple products, fixing the colour contrast on a wonky button used in one product will have no effect on any of the other product teams or products.
The next team over will make the same mistake tomorrow. And the team after that. You end up playing whack-a-mole with accessibility issues. You're burning through your budget and your sanity. And the organisation learns nothing.
As such, it seems we can't solve accessibility in a meaningful way by targeting our efforts at the lower unit levels. We need to target the highest levels at which we can work. That usually means the organisation level.
If you establish accessible design patterns in a shared component library, every team that uses that library benefits. If you demand accessibility from new hires, every new designer and developer enters with baseline knowledge. If you build accessibility checkpoints into your QA workflows, every release gets vetted before it ships. These are the system-level interventions that can scale. They compound. They mean you're not relying on individual heroes to save the day.
And if you look at any accessibility maturity scale, like the Accessibility Maturity Model from W3C, the The Digital Accessibility Maturity Model (DAMM) or the Capability Maturity Model, the organisations that have "solved" accessibility operate at the highest level.
It makes sense.
You are diagnosed by doctors, not nurses. You go to architects for building plans, not bricklayers. You hire a strategist to plan your business direction, not the person manning the till. The higher up the chain you work, the broader your impact.
And here's where I have a problem with the approach.
Yes, you need to think at the system-level. But changes are made at the unit level. Yes, you can't make meaningful impact and progress without both. But if I had to pick, and I almost always do, I'd pick the unit level always.
Theory without implementation is just a stupid exercise in who can talk more without saying much.
An accessibility strategy document gathering dust in Confluence doesn't help the user who is blind trying to navigate your checkout flow right now. A beautifully crafted organisation-wide policy means nothing if nobody knows it exists or has the time to implement it. Grand visions need grubby hands to make them real.
It's also why those same accessibility maturity scales have lower levels. And that's where most of us operate. That's where most organisations find themselves. Few ever "graduate" to the higher levels. Few aspire to even.
Why should that even be an aspiration?
The organisation exists to serve a customer. To do that, they put together teams that create a product in the hopes of solving a specific need for that customer. Being an industry leader in accessibility governance frameworks and organisational capability maturity isn't on their list. Does that mean accessibility is secondary?
Yes. And maybe not even that. I would bet it's further down their list of priorities. If we're lucky, its budget is higher than that of company retreats.
But that's if you're looking at accessibility as a separate line item on your budget.
Wouldn't a better solution be to make accessibility a part of the work that's already happening? To no longer treat it as an add-on cost and start treating it as a quality standard. Kind of the same way you treat security or performance. Integrate accessibility checks into the development workflow so they're not an optional afterthought but a required gate. Train your people so accessibility knowledge becomes distributed across the organisation rather than siloed with one overworked specialist.
Think global, act local.
That sounds about right. About. Because organisations usually suffer from a large disconnect between the top-level brass (that do the global-level thinking) and the boots on the ground (that do the acting at the local level). The executives decree that accessibility is a priority. The teams on the ground have no time, no training and no real tangible resources that supports accessible patterns. The strategy exists in PowerPoint. The reality exists in burnout and inaccessible products.
Think local and force global action.
Start where you are. Fix the wonky button. Build the accessible component. Document how you did it. Share it with the next team. When you've done it three times, you've created a pattern. When you've created five patterns, you've got the beginnings of a system. When other teams start using your work, you've proven the value. Now you've got evidence to take upstairs.
Bottom-up change is slower, messier and less elegant than top-down mandates.
But it's real. It sticks. And when you finally do get organisational buy-in, you're not starting from theory. You're scaling what already works.
You need both. But what if you're stuck choosing between a perfect system-level strategy that never gets implemented and a scrappy unit-level solution that ships tomorrow and helps actual users?
Pick the latter. Every. Time.
You can then use it to build the former.