How To Hire For Digital Accessibility Roles — Smashing Magazine

Build Accessibility Into Your Team, Not Just Your Product

Accessibility can’t be treated as a one-off project. Like security, it needs to be an ongoing program with dedicated ownership. There are three main ways to build that capacity: hire accessibility specialists, upskill your existing digital team, and secure executive champions. Each plays a different role, and the right mix depends on your organization’s size.

Getting started matters more than where you start. But understanding what each approach can and can’t do will help you sequence them effectively.

Why Accessibility Deserves a Permanent Program

The case for accessibility rests on several pillars that go beyond compliance:

• Ethical: Everyone should be able to access digital products.
• Legal: Most jurisdictions have either direct legislative requirements or a real risk of human-rights litigation.
• Business: People with disabilities represent roughly 15% of the global population and a substantial market with disposable income.
• Innovation: Inclusive design and diverse teams produce more creative products.
• Usability: Accessible products are simply easier for everyone to use.
• Technical: Accessible code tends to be more robust.
• Brand: Inclusive organizations build stronger loyalty and earn more positive attention.

Hire Accessibility Specialists With a Clear Mandate

An accessibility specialist deeply understands how to build accessible websites, mobile apps, and documents. They might hold IAAP Web Accessibility Specialist certification, have extensive hands-on experience, or bring lived experience as a person with a disability or assistive-technology user.

Hiring this specialist early gives you a clear picture of what’s needed at a technical level. The risk is that the specialist becomes a bottleneck. If they’re not senior enough to mandate changes, they can struggle to get teams to act. And without executive support—budget and authority—they’re likely to become frustrated and leave.

In a small organization (under 50 digital staff), hiring a specialist first can work well. In larger organizations, it’s usually better to secure an executive champion before bringing on a specialist, so the specialist has the backing they need.

Upskill Your Existing Team

Training your current team is the best way to decentralize accessibility. The more people who understand it, the more naturally it becomes part of every project. You do need standards, though. If there’s no specialist setting the bar, different teams may adopt inconsistent approaches.

Your training should cover the different ways each role contributes. For example, ensuring a percentage of your research participants have a disability is a different process from running dedicated accessibility studies—and you may want both. The important thing is that the whole organization knows when and how to include disabled people in research.

Baking accessibility into your design system is another strong lever. For something as simple as buttons, you can standardize:

• Colors for primary, secondary, and ghost variants;
• Default, disabled, focused, hover, and active states;
• Label handling for text-only, icon-only, and combined buttons;
• Minimum target sizes across screen sizes;
• When to use ARIA states like aria-expanded and aria-pressed;
• Accessible fallbacks for non-semantic elements, using role="button", tabindex="0", and keyboard event handlers for space and enter. (Real HTML buttons are almost always the better choice.)

A dedicated chat channel for accessibility questions helps too—answers stay open and searchable. Documentation only helps if it’s genuinely useful: contextual, bite-sized, up-to-date, and easy to find. Before creating more docs, check whether your existing ones are actually used.

Decentralizing accessibility across the team is one of the most sustainable and impactful moves you can make. But for larger organizations—50 or more digital staff—training isn’t usually a good first step. It needs budget and time, which typically requires an executive champion and a specialist to define the curriculum. Make it the third priority.

For smaller teams (under 20), upskilling first is often ideal. Budgets rarely stretch to a dedicated hire, and free or low-cost courses are a practical way to build knowledge. Small teams usually have direct access to leadership, so an executive champion is less critical—priorities can be set conversation by conversation. They can also stay agile, tackling accessibility needs project by project without a year-long budget cycle.

Find Executive Champions Who Can Clear the Path

An executive champion for accessibility is someone with the authority to make accessibility a priority across the organization. Without that person, specialists and training can only go so far. They ensure accessibility has a budget, a mandate, and a place in project planning.

In larger organizations, the champion is a prerequisite. In smaller ones, they still help, but the team can often operate without a formally designated one.

Consider Your Organization’s Size and Stage

The order in which you build accessibility capacity matters less than the fact that you build it—but here’s a practical sequencing guide:

• Small organization, small digital team: Upskill the team using low-cost resources, and work with leadership as needs arise.
• Mid-size organization: A specialist may be an easier hire to justify once a few people already understand accessibility.
• Larger organization: Secure an executive champion first, then hire a specialist, then invest in team-wide training.

Wherever you start, the goal is to make accessibility everyone’s work—supported by people who own it, trained in it, and accountable for it.

Start With An Executive Champion

An accessibility initiative rarely gains traction without an executive champion (or several) who can bring accessibility into budgeting, planning, and execution decisions. Accessibility cannot be an afterthought. Auditing a finished site and expecting to retrofit it into an accessible product rarely works without significant rework.

Shawn Lawton Henry makes the case for early integration in Just Ask: Integrating Accessibility Through Design:

“When accessibility is considered early and throughout design, it can be seamlessly and elegantly integrated with overall product design. Incorporating accessibility early decreases the time and money to design accessible products and increases the positive impact that accessibility can have on design overall. If accessibility is only addressed late in product design, it can be very costly to make required design changes. Furthermore, accessibility ‘tacked on’ at the end is usually much less effective for people with disabilities and less beneficial for others.”

The limitation of an executive champion is that they rarely possess the specialized knowledge to know how to weave accessibility into processes, which training will be most effective, or how to advise on procurement of accessible tools and services.

Team size is a reasonable guide for where to begin:

• Teams under 20 people should focus on upskilling existing staff.
• Teams of 20 to 50 people can start by hiring a dedicated accessibility specialist.
• Teams over 50 people should identify an executive champion first, then hire a specialist, then upskill the wider team.

Regardless of the path, prioritize filling roles with people who have disabilities — visible or invisible. Users of assistive technology (screen readers, magnifiers, alternative navigation) on the digital team provide invaluable testing and feedback. People with lived experience bring diversity and unique perspectives, and they are valuable team members even when they are not in accessibility-specific roles.

When To Hire A Company Instead

Organizations with digital teams larger than 100 people typically need an accessibility team of around five. If building that internally is not feasible, an accessibility consulting firm can create strategy, provide training and coaching, and recommend tools and processes.

Be cautious of "quick fix" vendors. Fixes that do not change underlying design and development practices will not build inclusive design capability and can worsen the experience for assistive technology users. Also be wary of companies that emphasize auditing: an audit is a snapshot in time, and without process change the team will keep introducing new issues. An audit is only useful once the team has an established accessibility practice and needs documentation to demonstrate compliance. The right partner works closely with your team to build internal capacity.

Skills And Team Composition

These skills are rarely found in one person. Expect to build a team of three to five accessibility specialists, or retain a consulting company. For role-specific guidance, the Teach Access accessibility skills hiring toolkit provides responsibilities, qualifications, resume screening guidance, and interview questions for more than ten digital team roles.

What Accessibility Specialists Actually Do

The core function of an accessibility specialist is enabling others. Rather than performing accessibility work themselves, they teach, recommend training, identify process changes, select tools, and measure progress.

Key activities for an accessibility team include:

• Ensuring user research includes diverse groups and coaching researchers on interviewing people with disabilities and accommodating their needs.
• Teaching designers to include accessibility annotations in deliverables and adding accessibility to design system components.
• Advising developers on building accessible components.
• Selecting testing tools that fit the development workflow and training people to use them.
• Performing pre-release UAT to confirm that researchers, designers, developers, and QA testers are applying accessibility practices, and adjusting processes when products fall short.
• Measuring overall program progress.

Specialists should not "do accessibility" by handling all the research, design, and coding for accessible products. That model does not scale, causes burnout, and is inefficient. The exception is a very small organization with infrequently updated products.

“What we have are a few people who know a lot about Accessibility. What we need are a lot of people to know a little about it.” — Matt May, Adobe

The team's role is to build the program, advocate internally, coach on difficult problems, create resources, deliver training, facilitate process change, and measure success.

Finding Candidates

Start internally. An accessibility champions network of volunteers can reveal existing knowledge on the team. Beyond standard hiring channels, consider posting on a11yjobs.com, the international accessibility Slack #jobs channel (request an invitation to the web-a11y Slack), and disability-focused boards such as Disabled Person in Canada and abilityJOBS in the U.S.

Clearly list accessibility skills in all job postings, even non-dedicated roles. For designer postings, include specific responsibilities such as selecting colors with accessible contrast ratios, specifying keyboard interactions, and considering touch target sizing. Scott O’Hara's accessibility interview questions can also help if you lack in-house expertise.

Budgeting For Accessibility Talent

Accessibility is a specialized skill set, and compensation must reflect that. Salary data is available on ZipRecruiter and Glassdoor. Also consider the level of the roles you are creating. Since accessibility specialists collaborate across the organization, a director-level title may be needed. If an executive champion is required, the appropriate title is Chief Accessibility Officer.

Publishing a salary range helps you compensate candidates who bring accessibility knowledge, attracts better talent, and incentivizes current employees to build new skills. Accessibility skills should factor into employee development planning.

Make The Hiring Process Itself Accessible

An inclusive hiring process is essential if you want to hire people with disabilities. If internal expertise is lacking, hire a consultant to review your process.

If you want to be able to hire people with disabilities, you really don’t want the job application process to be a barrier.

If a consultant is not in budget, at minimum provide an accessible channel for contacting HR or the hiring manager. A simple Google or Microsoft form for accommodation requests, linked from every job posting, candidate email, and interview invitation, is a practical starting point. And when someone requests an accommodation, make sure the organization can actually deliver: showing up to a video interview without captions when the candidate is hard of hearing is a poor experience and a brand risk.

Accessibility Is a Program, Not a Project

Organizations too often treat accessibility as a one-off task, but the discipline only delivers when it’s built into the culture like security. No engineering team runs a single vulnerability scan and calls security complete; accessibility deserves the same permanent, iterative investment. Starting small is fine — the important thing is to begin and then keep going.

That commitment pays back in concrete ways: a wider talent pool of contributors who bring diverse perspectives, sturdier and more flexible digital products that handle edge cases better, and a larger addressable audience. Beyond the business case, it makes the work itself more meaningful because the team knows its output serves everyone.

Next Steps

For readers ready to go deeper, the Smashing Magazine library offers several practical resources on building the case for accessibility, equivalent user experiences, accessible design patterns, and embedding testing at every stage of the delivery pipeline.

• “Making A Strong Case For Accessibility,” Todd Libby
• “Equivalent Experiences: Thinking Equivalently,” Eric Bailey
• “Good, Better, Best: Untangling The Complex World Of Accessible Patterns,” Carie Fisher
• “How To Bake Layers Of Accessibility Testing Into Your Process,” Kate Kalcevich & Mike Gifford