Culture Is a System of Habits
A year ago, I learned that my role as an accessibility engineer was at risk of redundancy. It was a difficult moment, professionally and personally. For a long while, my mind raced with guilt, self-doubt, and sadness. But as I sat with those emotions, I found one productive line of thought: reflection. What did I do well? What could I have done better? What did I learn?
Looking back, I realize that as part of a small team in a massive organization, we focused on a long-term goal we believed was the most effective and sustainable path: gradually shaping the organization’s culture to embrace accessibility. Around the same time, I started listening to James Clear’s Atomic Habits, and the connection was immediate. Habits and culture are tightly linked concepts. Fostering an accessibility culture is really about embedding accessibility habits into everyone’s processes.
That is what we concentrated on. It took time — and plenty of trial and error — to figure it out. There is no definitive playbook for creating an accessibility program at a large organization, but sharing what I learned may help others on a similar path.
Goals Versus Systems
To effectively shape habits, it is crucial to focus on systems and processes — who we want to become — rather than obsessing over a final goal or what we want to achieve. This perspective is especially relevant in accessibility.
Take the goal of making an app accessible. If you focus solely on achieving compliance without changing the underlying systems — embedding accessibility into processes and culture — progress will be temporary. You might request an accessibility audit and fix the flagged issues, which offers “quick” results, but it is often a short-lived solution.
Software evolves constantly: features are rewritten, old code is removed, and new functionality is added. Without an underlying system in place, accessibility issues quickly resurface. Worse, this approach can reinforce the idea that accessibility is external: something checked by someone else, fixed only when flagged. Accessibility issues also become increasingly expensive the later they are addressed in the process. It can feel demoralizing when accessibility becomes synonymous with a pile of last-minute tickets at your busiest moments.
Despite this, companies constantly focus on the goal rather than the systems.
“Accessibility is both a state and a practice.”
— Sommer Panage, SwiftTO talk, “Building Accessibility into Your Company, Team, and Culture”
I will take the liberty of tweaking that slightly: accessibility is a state and, aspirationally, a practice. Without recognizing the importance of the practice, any progress made is at risk of regression.
Instead of chasing a static state of compliance, organizations should focus on building habits and embedding good accessibility practices into their workflows. A strong system not only ensures lasting progress but also fosters a culture where accessibility becomes second nature.
Defining the Real Objective
None of this means goals are useless. They are highly effective for setting direction. In my team, we often said — half-jokingly — that our ultimate goal was to put ourselves out of a job. That mindset reflects an important principle: accessibility is a cross-organizational responsibility, not the task of a single person or team.
Focusing solely on compliance rather than culture transformation — prioritizing the “state” of accessibility over the “practice” — is a flawed strategy. The real goal should be to build a user-centric culture where accessibility is embedded in every workflow, decision, and process. By doing so, companies can create products where accessibility is not about checking boxes and closing tickets but about delivering meaningful and inclusive experiences to all users.
Building a Strategy That Scales
No accessibility team ever feels fully resourced, which makes prioritization the heart of any serious strategy. The most effective approach in most organizations is to shift left, resolving issues as early in the development process as possible. The tactics below are not sequential steps but concurrent fronts that reinforce one another.
Leveraging Design Systems
A design system is one of the highest-leverage partners an accessibility team can have. Fixing a single component that is used across dozens of features improves the experience everywhere at once. The same logic applies to getting involved early in foundational decisions, such as color palettes, typography, and component interactions. Contributing accessibility guidance to documentation helps teams across the organization make informed choices without becoming experts themselves.
Growing a Community of Allies
The more limited your resources, the more allies you need. A simple Slack channel where people feel safe asking questions and sharing tips is a strong starting point. Lunch-and-learns, regular meetups, office hours, and a more formal champions network all help spread the work. Equally important is recognizing and celebrating wins so that accessibility work doesn't feel like a thankless slog.
Educating Everyone on the Basics
Not everyone needs to be an accessibility specialist, but everyone should know the basics. Training should be tailored by role, since PMs, designers, and engineers each make different kinds of decisions. Embedding accessibility in onboarding and documentation is essential. Design is a particularly valuable target for education; one Deque case study found that 67% of automatically detectable accessibility issues originate in the design phase. Partnering with an existing education or training program can amplify these efforts.
Using Automation as a Safety Net
Automation should be employed wherever possible to lighten the load, especially in larger organizations. However, automated checks are not a silver bullet. Some vendors claim that automated tools catch as much as 57% of all issues, or even 80% by volume in some reports, but the widely accepted figure is that they catch about 30%. Native mobile apps are even harder to test automatically, making the real number significantly lower for iOS and Android. High expectations around these tools can create a false sense of security or reduce accessibility to an exercise in appeasing a tool.
Automation doesn't (and shouldn't) replace intentionality. We should aim to deliver great accessible experiences from the start rather than wait for a tool to flag issues after the fact.
Manual testing remains essential, and whenever possible, you should test with real users. The greatest value of automation is catching basic regressions before release and serving as a gentle reminder to developers. It should prompt reflection: How did this issue arise in the first place? Did we consider accessibility during development? Did we skip manual testing with a screen reader?
The environment matters when it comes to shaping habits. A strong accessibility culture isn't built on willpower alone; it thrives on systems that make good practices easier and bad ones harder to fall into.
Fixing Strategically, Not Individually
A common trap for accessibility professionals is trying to fix every issue single-handedly. Rewarding as it may be at first, that approach doesn't scale in larger organizations and quickly leads to burnout. It also signals to the rest of the company that accessibility is your team's job, an expectation that becomes very hard to reset. Take a hands-on approach where it counts, supporting teams with complex issues, pair programming, conducting code reviews, and implementing cross-app improvements in partnership with design system teams. This delivers broader impact.
Auditing at the Right Time
Audits are a tool, not a strategy. They work best as a validation step after teams have already done their best work, not as the starting point. An audit that flags mostly basic issues that automation could have caught is not a useful exercise. Audits can help when you need quick results but lack the time to upskill the workforce before remediation is required. Aside from those situations, relying on audits as the core of your approach is misguided.
The Forgotten Front: Workforce Diversity
Beyond these technical and process-oriented levers, other initiatives matter: collecting accessibility metrics, conducting user research, improving procurement practices, ensuring accessible content, and supporting accessible hiring and workplace tools. None of these areas is inherently more important than another, but the lack of diversity in the workforce is one of the biggest reasons cultural change takes so long.
The industry has not done enough to hire people with disabilities. They are underrepresented in building the products that are meant to work for them, face more barriers in the hiring process, and often find that workplace tools themselves aren't accessible once they are hired. This is a slower and less obvious line of work, but it is foundational.
Why Leadership Buy-In Matters
Most accessibility efforts begin from the bottom up, but a sustainable strategy needs both top-down and bottom-up support. Getting leadership on board is often the hardest part, yet it is essential if you want to avoid constantly fighting an uphill battle. Leaders tend to respond to business arguments: they want to know how accessibility affects the bottom line. If you can build a convincing case on profitability, that is a valid path forward.
Dave Dame made a memorable point on this topic: stakeholders will agree accessibility is important but still hesitate to invest in it. To get their attention, you may need to speak their language. As Dame put it, “I have Cerebral Palsy, but my money doesn’t.” Framing accessibility as a market opportunity or a way to reduce legal risk can open doors. There is data suggesting accessibility investments can pay off financially.
Still, economic and legal justifications carry their own risks. When compliance becomes the strategy, teams may settle for the bare minimum or constantly need to demonstrate return on investment. Those incentives can distort the work. Doing accessibility for the “wrong” reasons is better than not doing it at all, but it is not the ultimate goal.
A better model comes from Apple. The company renewed its commitment to accessibility partly because schools in Maine needed screen readers for students — a business-driven decision, to be sure. But over time, the mindset shifted. Tim Cook later said he does not consider “the bloody ROI” when making devices accessible to the blind, adding that “Accessibility rights are human rights.” That is the kind of cultural shift to aim for: moving from “we have to do it” to “it is part of who we are.” Apple has since become an industry leader in accessibility, not because it chased compliance, but because accessibility became core to its product philosophy.
Culture Needs Steady Care
Good accessibility habits, once embedded, tend to persist. When the author was let go from their company, colleagues assumed the app’s accessibility would quickly regress. The author hoped otherwise — that would be a sign the work had been done well. Experienced people with genuine passion for accessibility remained at the company, and the product was in good hands.
Still, no culture is self-sustaining. Accessibility cultures require constant nurturing and protection. Rapid hiring, major layoffs, acquisitions, turnover, or shifts in leadership can destabilize in months what took years to build. Complacency is a real danger; treat the culture as an ongoing investment, not a finished achievement.
The Bigger Picture
There is no silver bullet. The odds often feel stacked against those pushing for accessibility, and it is easy to wonder why something so obviously right — inviting more people to use your product, removing barriers, avoiding exclusion — meets so much resistance.
Kat Holmes points out that “inclusion” means different things to different people, but “exclusion” is universally understood. Once you can recognize exclusion, you can see where a product that works for some creates barriers for others. That recognition can spark creative solutions. Jennison Asuncion adds that people fundamentally want to do the right thing; they just may not know what they do not know. Meeting people where they are, even re-explaining fundamentals repeatedly, is how hearts and minds change.
As a practical starting point:
- If you have not started, start now.
- Think long-term: build systems and processes, not just goals.
- Cultivate allies and get leadership buy-in by showing accessibility is not extra work but missed steps when deferred.
- Be strategic with limited resources; aim for the largest, most lasting impact.
- Stay persistent and resilient.
Any progress counts. Improving things a little every day is enough. The work you do matters.
