The Organisation That Never Prioritised It

The first piece in this series was about engineering. The second was about design. But engineering doesn’t hire itself. Design leadership doesn’t set its own values in a vacuum. Both failures come from the organisation above them.

The agency problem

Start with agencies and consultancies, because the failure mode there is the most naked.

A client brief arrives. It has a budget, a timeline, a list of deliverables. It doesn’t mention accessibility and the agency doesn’t add it. Nobody weighed it up and ruled it out. Nobody in the room knew it should be there, so it never crossed their minds.

That’s a skills problem, and it’s bigger than one project.

Because when a client does ask for it (and increasingly, under the European Accessibility Act, some of them are), the agency has a problem. There’s nobody in-house who can deliver it properly. No front-end engineer who really knows accessibility. No designer who knows the difference between annotating for accessibility and designing for it. What happens instead is a scramble: a subcontractor brought in late, an audit bolted on at the end, a compliance report produced by someone who ran a tool and called it done. The client asked the right question. The agency couldn’t answer it.

They ship something anyway. It goes live. The audit report goes in the appendix. The people who can’t use it never appear in the case study.

The enterprise problem

The enterprise fails differently, with the same result.

Large organisations don’t scope accessibility out. They bury it under process, governance and the kind of leadership that gets rewarded for changing nothing.

The thinking is dated, and nobody’s ever made them change it. Digital transformation arrived at these organisations as a phrase before it arrived as a reality, and in many of them it still hasn’t fully landed. There are people in decision-making positions at major organisations who haven’t a clue what a screen reader is, why it matters, or that there are legal obligations around it. They have survived this long without knowing. The organisation rewarded them anyway.

Below them, accessibility teams exist. Sometimes. They produce guidelines. They run workshops. They write standards documents that nobody reads. They push from the bottom of the hierarchy and find, repeatedly, that the organisation above them is not structured to respond.

The process wasn’t built for it: governance cycles older than WCAG, procurement that never asks about it, sign-off chains where it isn’t a criterion. You can have the most capable accessibility specialist in the country embedded in an enterprise and watch them achieve almost nothing, because the organisation they’re embedded in was never designed to act on what they find.

That’s what slow looks like from the inside. Nobody’s being stupid. The processes, incentives and reporting lines were built for another era and nobody has questioned them since.

The engineer who doesn’t understand semantic HTML didn’t appear from nowhere. They were hired by an organisation that decided front-end specialism wasn’t worth the cost. The creative director who removed focus outlines wasn’t acting alone. They worked in an organisation that never made accessibility a value: never put it in a brief, never raised it in a crit, never included it in what counted as excellent work.

The disciplines fail because the organisation permits the failure. Sometimes actively, by scoping it out. More often passively, by never requiring anything different.

When it does work

Some organisations are getting this right. Not many, but some. The ones that are have one thing in common: somebody at a senior enough level decided accessibility was non-negotiable, and built the conditions for that to be true. They didn’t stop at a workshop or a policy. They changed who they hired, what they measured and what they rewarded, and stuck at it.

It requires leadership that understands what it’s committing to, and that’s rare in organisations where digital literacy thins out at the senior levels.

For the majority (the agencies still leaving it out of scope, the enterprises still running governance processes designed for a pre-digital world) the EAA provided a legal nudge. Some of them will respond to that nudge. More of them will find the minimum viable compliance response and treat the problem as solved.

An accessibility statement in the footer and a completed audit checklist do not make a product accessible. They make it defensible. The failure starts here, before anyone writes a brief or a line of code.

However good its people are, an organisation that never prioritised accessibility won’t ship accessible products.

Unless someone inside decides to build differently anyway. Designers who ask the question the brief didn’t ask. Engineers who fix what wasn’t required. Accessibility specialists who refuse to let the governance cycle be the last word. They’re not fixing the system. But they’re doing the work anyway: side of desk, under the radar, between the things the organisation actually asked for. It’s no substitute for the organisation doing its job.