Becoming a web accessibility advocate
A valuable customer reached out to our CTO directly, bypassing the support team, to report that our product didn’t work with screen readers. They passed the note on to me, since it was my area, but warned that accessibility work could turn into a never-ending chase for perfection. At the time, I tended to agree. I’d brushed off accessibility bugs before. They impacted “so few users.” But I’m an enterprise PM, so I took the call with the customer.
The person I met with wasn’t just an executive, they were disabled themselves. They were calm, persuasive, and absolutely right. Accessibility isn’t optional. It’s required by law. It protects users. It prevents lawsuits. Then they mentioned something I’d never heard of: a VPAT—a Voluntary Product Accessibility Template. It's a self-audit of how your product meets or fails to meet the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). After the call, I looked it up and created one myself.
How I did it
I read through every WCAG 2.1 AA criterion—over 60 of them. I filled out the VPAT line by line. Where we failed, I opened a Jira ticket. I created at least 30 tickets, prioritized them by severity and user impact, pasted in all the conformance information from the spec, and began introducing five at a time into each sprint. I helped test each one for remediation.
We also added support for captions styling, a requirement under the ADA for some industries. It wasn’t a high-priority initiative at the time, but I made the case and saw it through because it was the right thing to do.
And it worked
The original customer not only stayed with us, they also became a partner, testing each improvement with assistive tech and giving us feedback we couldn’t have gotten on our own. And soon other customers were giving us feedback, too.
My team, initially skeptical, ended up proud. One engineer in particular took on a lot of the tickets. And I spoke publicly about the project at an accessibility conference. I also gave a company-wide presentation on global disability rates and legal risks. The product got better and so did the team.
Outcomes
WCAG 2.1 AA conformance
Retained a high-value customer
Shared our work publicly at a national conference
Proactively improved compliance for future deals
What I wish more people understood
Accessibility isn’t infinite.
It’s not a black hole—it’s a list of criteria. It ends. You can scope it. You can finish it. This was years ago, and today there are far more tools available (many of them paid) that help teams implement, test, and evaluate accessibility against modern standards.
You won’t be able to measure the impact.
Browsers don’t let you track assistive tech usage, and that’s intentional. Users deserve privacy. So this work lands quietly. But it still matters.
You won’t always get credit.
Not all high-leverage work looks like strategy. Some of it looks like a VPAT, a pile of tickets, and a customer who finally feels seen. We earned trust, which is easy to lose and won’t show up on a dashboard. I didn’t do this work because someone asked. I did it because it was the right thing to do, and I had the clarity, empathy, and execution skills to carry it through.