If the top-down approach was about the rule book, bottom-up is about empathy and craft.
This approach doesn't start with a memo from the CEO. It has very humble beginnings. It starts with the person writing the code, picking the colours and writing the button text. The front-line people. The people who actually build the product every day.
They aren't doing it because a lawyer told them to. They're doing it because they take pride in their work and want it to be high-quality for everyone who uses it. They're doing it because they feel what their users feel when they get stuck in a flow and get frustrated. They're feeling the exhaustion of someone with a motor impairment who has to tab through fifty irrelevant links just to find what they're looking for. Or the confusion of someone with low vision staring at a grey-on-white text block that looks like a cloud instead of a sentence.
At least personally, I feel a quiet, deep satisfaction when I build something that works. It's something I can't quite describe, save to say it helps me sleep well at night and I wake up hungry to do more of it the next day.
The good
- It shows real empathy. When they care about accessibility, they're thinking about the human on the other side of the screen. They want the product to feel "easy," not "compliant."
- Quality comes built in. The code is cleaner, the designs are clearer and the whole product just works better.
- It’s silly contagious. When one person on a team starts showing off how much better it works with a keyboard or a screen reader, others usually want to join in.
The not-so-good
- If you’re the only one who cares, it's exhausting. You might be fighting for extra time that your manager hasn't officially given you. It sucks and takes a mental toll on your life.
- If one team cares and another doesn't, the user experience is still poor. One part of the product works beautifully, click a link to go to the next one and that's a pile of garbage.
- It takes time for it to catch on. A lot of time.
At the end of the day, you might have the best intentions, but if you need budget to do it and you might not have the "top-down" power to pay for it, you're fighting against the wind.
Even this bottom-up approach needs its top-down counterpart.