axe-con 2026: Organizational Success with Accessibility Track

The Organizational Success with Accessibility Track focuses on bringing accessibility into organizational culture, not just relying on designers and developers to do all the work. Tips for getting stakeholder buy-in, case studies on successful program implementations, and more were covered. Here are our thoughts on two days of organizational talks. 

Digital Accessibility as a Competitive Advantage

Speaker: Mali M Fernando, MBE, Group Head of Digital Experience and Accessibility, HSBC UK

Summary/Insights: Megan James

Mali opened the talk by highlighting their own accessibility journey at HSBC in digital banking. The biggest takeaway wasn't about exact tools or compliance, but about culture. Accessibility only scales, he argued, when organizations change hearts and minds. Focusing on bringing in lived experiences from the community and embedding inclusion into everyday decision making is what creates a sustainable system.

Major enablers in their own ecosystem are the tools they provide for the staff. Training is built around real-world scenarios to explain both why disability inclusion matters and how to solve common accessibility problems in practice.

Other insights and practices they follow include:

• Culture over compliance: Don’t wait for additional regulation to make things better. Most exclusion comes from lack of awareness, not malice. Education and storytelling are critical.
• Accessibility as a business driver: Inclusive design builds loyalty, expands commercial reach, reduces risk, and strengthens brand trust.
• Procurement: HSBC adjusted its procurement process so vendors must meet accessibility standards or commit to a clear roadmap, holding partners accountable across the lifecycle.
• Role-specific enablement: Designers, product managers, and developers receive practical, skills-based training through an accessibility hub and internal learning platforms.
• Responsible innovation: AI and digital tools must be accessible and handled with strong data governance.
• Open relationships matter: Continuous dialogue with customers, employees, and partners fuels improvement.

Another powerful example of impact was a collaboration they had with Zoom, where their teams advocacy helped introduce a feature that reduces seizure risk from flashing content. The change was sparked by an incident affecting one of their own colleagues, which prompted internal reflection and external action. Overall, the session reinforced that accessibility is not a side initiative. It’s a strategic, cultural, and operational commitment that requires engagement at every level.

Let me Enjoy the Show! Accessibility in Event Platforms

Speaker: David Sabaté, CEO, TOTHOM

Summary/Insights: Haley Troyer

Buying tickets to an event should be simple… right? Unfortunately, for many users, there are so many points of friction that make it difficult, if not impossible, to provide users with disabilities access to culture. Another challenge is that, many times, buying a ticket for an event does not occur on just one platform. It spans multiple platforms, from social media, to event websites, to payment applications, etc. This complicates things because each platform needs to be accessible. In this talk, David introduced us to three fictional users and highlighted the pain points that they may experience during each point in the process of buying event tickets, and what we can do to mitigate these issues.

Common issues in a typical ticket purchase workflow:

1. Seeing a poster/ad on social media: details included in the image could have low contrast, or not have alternative text, meaning low-vision users would not be able to see it.
2. Entering the event website: Redundant links (for example, “Buy tickets”) for each event makes it difficult for screen reader users to select the correct event.
3. Choosing a date: calendars may not be exposed to the keyboard or screen readers, meaning anyone using these technologies would not be able to select a date.
4. Selecting a seat: If event targets for available seats are too small, it could be hard for users with mobility issues to select the right seat.
5. Checking out: Forms without proper labels or error/confirmation announcements could make it impossible for some users to complete their purchase.

Tips for ensuring that every part of the process is accessible:

• Use accessible color combinations
• Ensure clickable targets/buttons are large enough
• Include text alternatives to any information communicated by color
• Ensure the tab order is logical/predictable
• Announce errors and confirmations
• Include clear shortcuts/skip to content options
• Ensure the focus indicator is clearly visible at all times
• Allow the interface to respond to zooming in/out
• Ensure PDF documents (like tickets) are accessible

These tips are great for all digital products, not just event websites!

Shift-up Accessibility: An Effective Accessibility Governance Framework for Leaders

Speakers:
Sam Chandrashekar, Global Accessibility Lead, D2L
Sunil Kumar Suvvari, Principal Agile Practitioner (Accessibility), AT&T

Summary/Insights: Ashley Helminiak

By now, we've all probably heard the popular phrase of "shifting-left," simply meaning to move accessibility and other initiatives to happen earlier in the process and to be baked in at all steps. So what's shifting-up? It's the idea of shifting accessibility's importance above the team level. You could be quashing bugs and trying to build accessibilities into your practices, but when leadership doesn't also own accessibility, it can be difficult to get the time and budget required to do it right. So why do we need to shift up? Sunil explained five reasons:

1. Culture starts at the top
2. Governance prevents reactive chaos
3. Prevention costs less
4. Mindset shifts from minimum compliance to long-term strategic commitment
5. Accessibilty becomes holistic, unified, and measurable

So what is shifting-up, really? Sam explained the five pillars of the shift-up framework, many of which I was already quite familiar with:

1. Empathic Culture
2. Compatible Technology
3. Accessible Content
4. Inclusive Delivery
5. Collaborative Community

They pointed out the many benefits of top-down accessibility, such as increased consumer base, better employee satisfaction and retention, etc. Most of this wasn't new to me. The question is, how to get there? They illustrated the J4P framework: People (roles and responsibitilies), Policy (standards, guidelines), Practices, and XXXX. Jumping off of that is the CHAMPIONS framework, which is a basis of shifting-up:

1. Course content, technology and resources: All training and communication materials should be accessible.
2. Holistic accessible digital ecosystem: Any applications, third-party tools, etc. should be part of an integrated, barrier-free experience.
3. Assessment and continuous improvement: Create a sustainable feedback loop of digital accessibility and responsive action.
4. Management and oversight: Make sure accessibility efforts are coordinated and have defined ownership and responsibility.
5. Policies and procedures: Create a widely understood written policy that is actively implemented.
6. Inclusive culture: Embed digital accessibility into the strategic direction of the organization.
7. Ongoing training and support: Equip team with knowledge, tools, and support to implement and sustain accessibility effectively.
8. New technology: Build accessibility into the procurement process of new tools, modules, etc.
9. Sustainability: Initiatives and processes can be continued long-term. 

Sam pointed out that this framework is flexible and can be applied to various situations and organizations. And can have many positive impacts on your organization, both internally and with brand reputation. I know I'm interested in making progress in some of these areas this year for RDG. Cheers to continual progress!

Proving Progress: The Metrics Behind Sustainable Accessibility

Speaker: Glenda Sims, Chief Information Accessibility Officer, Deque Systems

Summary/Insights: Ashley Helminiak

I was excited for this talk, since metrics is something that is often difficult to obtain without expensive solutions. Glenda started right off the bat by pointing out that most a11y metrics fail because they're not forward-facing, but instead looking at the past. It also supports more of an emergency/reactive culture instead of being proactive. But how do you measure proactive accessibility? If you're being proactive, then the metrics you look at need to change. Glenda talked about prevention metrics as a means to measure proactive initiatives and had some tips to that effect:

• Stop just measuring bugs found. If that's all you're measuring, you're only measuring your reaction to issues that made it out the door. Measuring things like amount of fixes accepted during development, the number of discovered automated issues that make it to production (automated issue leakage), the amount of time it takes to neutralize an issue, etc. can provide much more valuable insight.
• Annual audits do not equal continuous health. You can't manage what you only measure once a year. If you equate it to taking care of your own health, you may go to the doctor once a year, but you often monitor your health with smart watches, weight checks, dieting, etc. throughout the year, then go to the doctor for a checkup even if you feel healthy.
• Utilize intelligent monitoring. Automated monitoring can be used for strategic coverage and more regular statistics gathering. Manual testing can focus on key flows, be done less often, and focus on complex defects and issues.

She points out that the accessibility health of a product isn't in the absence of issues, but the speed of recovery. Healthy systems still break, and regressions are inevitable. But improving detection and speed are essential in maintaining and improving the overall health of your product.

Another thing she brought up were procurement metrics. Any 3rd-party software has its own accessibility health, and can influence your product negatively. Most accessibility risk is bought, but the legal risk is on the organization that utilizes that 3rd-party product. We should be asking vendors to show proof of accessibility in their products and program. There are questions called the HECVAT (Higher Education Community Vendor Assessment Toolkit) that can help you assess 3rd-party accessibility questions. You can also ask for an Accessibility Conformance Report (ACR), which often results in a VPAT being provided. That should be evaluated as well, for how old it is, which standard it uses, how complete it is, etc.

The other metric Glenda said to track is internal, and has to do with accountability and knowledge/execution of accessibility within each person's role. Everyone should have an understanding of accessibility and why it maters, as well as what their particular responsibility is within their job description. Some ways to measure this can be how often they utilize testing tools, what regressions rates are on projects worked on, etc. These things can help reveal how committed a developer is to maintaining and applying accessibility best practices.

I found a lot of value in this talk, and hope to find some ways to increase our metrics tracking in several areas in the coming year. Metrics in this case to me really mean accountability, both to ourselves and our clients.

Shifting Left: Building an Ecosystem to Scale Accessibility

Speakers:
Todd Keith, EVP, Head of UX, Regions Bank
Katrina Lee, UX Program Manager, Regions Bank

Summary/Insights: Haley Troyer

In this talk, Todd and Kristina talked about the evolution of accessibility at Regions Bank. Hiring a single standalone accessibility analyst quickly evolved into integrating multiple accessibility experts across product teams and empowering their people to learn and talk about accessibility freely. Rather than thinking about accessibility as a separate phase of a project, they “shifted left” and integrated accessibility into all stages of their workflow, from discovery to design and development and beyond. This snowballed into a culture of growth and empathy for their team and users.

Throughout the talk, they shared all of the moves that they made throughout their accessibility journey, and the one that I found most interesting was the idea of relating accessibility to your company’s core values. For example, Regions’ core values included things like:

• Put people first: accessibility puts people first.
• Do what is right: accessibility is the right thing to do.
• Focus on your customer: accessibility enhances usability for all.

This really reinforced the idea that accessibility should be integrated into everything, rather than treated as a separate goal or a checklist to complete. It was interesting to hear about how this company started from the ground up in developing their accessibility program!

Scaling Accessibility in a Complex Enterprise: Lessons from Audits, Adoption, and Shared Practices

Speaker: Ryan Schoch, Interaction Design Lead, UX, Wolters Kluwer

Summary/Insights: Ashley Helminiak

Not going to lie, I wasn't sure I would be able to glean much from this talk other than admiration for an enterprise-level accessibility program. But I did very much like how Ryan referred to it as "accessibility systems." Systems can apply to any size of organization. He discussed the reality of how we often have products on the surface, dependent on shared systems, sometimes built on a legacy foundations. When ownership isn't clean, issues may be discovered by people that aren't empowered to solve the issue.

In order to have a successful system, ownership needs to be clear, and we need to move beyond training, documentation, and availability and change behavior, adoption, and consistency in order to scale accessibility. I liked his phrase, "you can't ticket your way out of bad architecture." 

What worked for his company was to set interaction expectations and share a specification library for designers to use, driving the with appropriate markup, component states, etc. Building testing into the process early and often also helped scale accessibility within their organization. The thing to keep in mind is that without reinforcement, patterns can be created, but won't normalize into standard practice.

Things that moved the needle the most for his organization were:

• Design system alignment
• Shared review practices
• Cross-functional ownership

I also appreciated how candid he was regarding what he would do differently. Tips like starting where adoption already exist, and using audits to learn instead of judge, are good to keep in mind. I know that it's can be easy for statistics to feel like report cards (I fell into this trap when I first got started in accessibility), so positioning it as a learning opportunity to increase understandability is a great idea. I've been thinking about ways that RDG can further our own accessibility processes and best practices, and got some useful ideas for this talk. Looking forward to how we can continue to grow!

The European Accessibility Gap: Measuring Private Sector Compliance with the EAA Using Axe-core

Speaker: Alex Haidar, Senior Consultant - Compliance, Tech4Access

Summary/Insights: Ashley Helminiak

This talk went over the now regulatory requirement for accessibility in the private sector in Europe. Because governance requires evidence, testing and verifiable evidence is required. The issue is that most organizations don't know their real accessibility baseline, and/or treat accessibility as a one-off project instead of an ongoing initiative. I did appreciate his comparison between the EN 301 549 and the EAA, the former being centered around technical adequacy, the latter around legal compliance. So the EAA requires technical accessibility and governance and documentary evidence.

The study they conducted was a nationwide (Spain) study on the private sector, and focused on EAA readiness after June 2025. Their goal was to provide an evidence-based baseline and aid in governance and prioritization. They tested 204 private-sector websites across five different industries. Their results were disheartening, to say the least, with only 2% of sites being fully compliant on the criteria tested. 86% were partially compliant, but 12% failed every single criteria tested. In total, 98% of companies tested would have not passed a technical audit.

Here were some of the most common barriers found during their testing

• WCAG 4.1.2: Name, role, value
• WCAG 1.4.3: Color contrast
• WCAG 2.4.4: Purpose of links
• WCAG 1.1.1: Missing alt text
• WCAG 1.3.1: Information and relationships

These issues revealed that many issues were patterns, where small changes could result in big wins. The issues of compliance were fairly evenly spread across the different sector, with no one sector standing out as being ahead of the others. Their WCAG-based adequacy numbers were slightly better, with 33-67% of sites proving WCAG 2.1 AA adequacy by sector. There was a very prevalent pattern of gaps between evidence of accessibility and actual accessibility as well.

In my personal opinion, I think that ongoing proof of accessibility is important, but also providing means to communicate accessibility issues. I would hope that any discovered issues could be collaborated on and resolved together, instead of triggering endless lawsuits and fights. Governance can hopefully aid in this end in the EU, creating a different culture around accessibility than the US currently has.

This talk was a whirlwind with a lot of information, but overall very eye opening, and honestly hopeful that there is a world where accessibility improvements and remediation aren't viewed with dread and defense, but with open minds and a willingness to change.

Designing for Everyone: IKEA's Journey Toward Inclusive Digital Experiences

Speaker: Paulina Bergman, Global Inclusive Design and Accessibility Principal, IKEA Retail

Summary/Insights: Ashley Helminiak

Paulina was very open about her neurodivergence and how to be accepting of others. She had some great tips on how to become a more inclusive leader:

• Educate yourself
• If someone shares about a disability, neurodivergence, etc., thank them for sharing
• Find solutions to barriers together
• Be clear in communication and expectations
• Make people feel seen, heard, and supported

She then started discussing the Digital Inclusive Design, Equity & Accessibility Centre of Expertise (Digital IDEA CoE, or Digital IDEA for short). They noted how designing for "the masses." Their goal is to meet everyone's needs in the digital space, and they did that with strategic movements in three areas: Communities, Customers, and Co-Workers. I really liked how she continued to say "meet people where they are." It emphasizes accepting people rather than trying to make them conform to a social or cultural standard.

The ways that the IKEA team works has driven them to have different focus areas: Integration, operations, research, compliance, and innovation. Integration and operations in particular have been a driver in the creation of inclusive digital experiences. But they do have some perennial challenges that look pretty familiar:

• Buy-in, resources, & prioritization
• Measurement & maturity
• Change management

One thing that IKEA has grasped well is including people with disability in their user research. they also have one digital accessibility team, supporting the entire IKEA value chain. This means that there is one documentation source, and means to create a single way of thinking and understanding with regards to accessibility. They created their own Accessibility Hub, which contains templates, learning materials, standards, and more, centralized for any team across the IKEA organization. Another thing they created to expand accessibility is craft an AI solution that generates alt text for images they use, so that no matter the use case, the image has more robust alt text and a unified, on brand tone of voice.

Paulina talked about looking to change their digital spaces to feel like home, the same way they strive for that in their physical spaces. I loved her take on building something for people regardless of what she called "digital confidence," which resonates with me on multiple levels. There are still varied levels of comfort with computer and internet use, different means of interacting with website, people who have been through trauma and now have to learn a whole new way to navigate, etc. that can affect someone's digital confidence. But by working to meet people where they are, more people can explore their products their way.

To me, this goes back to having a solid foundation for a good user experience, and not narrowing your user groups by mistakenly thinking you're designing for the masses. Great point of view!

Building Without Barriers on GitHub

Speaker: Ed Summers, Head of Accessibility, GitHub

Summary/Insights: Riley Rittenhouse

In this session, Ed talked about some of the tools available in GitHub for accessibility testing using AI. It’s nice to see some different tools that are available since some of our sites are in GitHub. Through Continuous AI they push their initiative to shift accessibility left, integrate across the SDLC and scale accessibility.

GitHub Copilot

• Code completion - provides inline code suggestions in your editor.
• Copilot chat - ask general questions about code and ask Copilot to implement changes.
• Copilot coding agent - assign issues to “@copilot” that will then create a pull request with a change that can be reviewed and merged. Has domain specific knowledge and able to limit tool access for security.
• Copilot code review - automatically reviews every pull request, proposes improvements and explains reasoning.

I did appreciate that he mentioned that there isn’t a substitute for good design and real feedback from users. 

Helpful Links:

• gh.io/a11y-docs
• gh.io/a11y-scanner
• gh.io/a11y-scanner-demo

Small Team, Big Shift: Lessons Learned from Four Years of Building an Accessibility Program at a Mid-sized Saas

Speakers:
Evelyn Wightman, Senior Accessibility Specialist, Cvent
Amanda Bolton, Senior Software Development Engineer in Test, Cvent
Stephen Cutchins, Senior Manager-Accessibility, Cvent

Summary/Insights: Haley Troyer

Change is hard. Changing established company processes can seem impossible. At Cvent, however, a few passionate people were able to champion accessibility and integrate it into their processes by getting early buy-in from a very important source: their clients.

A typical accessibility program launch might go a little something like this:

1. One person cares enough about accessibility to try to initiate change within the company.
2. This person brings issues up to various teams, like design, development, marketing, etc.
3. People in those teams don’t see the value, or don’t want to change their workflows.
4. The program dies out, and clients never hear anything about it.

At Cvent, their accessibility program still started with a few people, but one of the first things that they did was send VPATs to their clients, whether those reports were good or bad. Upon receiving the VPATs, their clients were immediately interested in improving accessibility. This client interest, in turn, forced teams across all levels and departments of the organization to get on board. Accessibility quickly became a part of their process in order to make their clients happy.

This was incredibly interesting to me because I think sometimes we feel like we need to have everything figured out before involving clients. This session, however, proved that clients can actually be an important part of the process, even before you have all of the answers!
 

Changing the World Through Procurement Accessibility

Speaker: Mark Stimson, Director of Digital Accessibility, Kaiser Permanente

Summary/Insights: Riley Rittenhouse

Last one! Mark works for Kaiser Permanente, which provides affordable health care services and is one of the nation’s largest not-for-profit heath plans. He talked about ways to get vendors to provide accessible products that will improve accessibility for all customers. He covered contracts, playbooks and ways to gain trust and forge relationships through making sure accessibility follows WCAG standards. In the US liability is on the customer, while in Europe it falls on both parties. 

Fortunately at RDG we are dedicated to incorporating accessibility from the start, and following WCAG guidelines. I have seen different reactions when it comes to clients caring about accessibility, so I appreciated hearing his thoughts on that.

Read our insights from the other tracks:

• Keynotes
• Development Track
• Design Track
• Wildcard Track