Accessibility Program & Operations Management

Overview

Spring Health had a strong product vision but no formal accessibility program. As the design system and accessibility lead, I built the practice from scratch — establishing standards, tooling, training, and the operational rhythm to sustain it.

This was less a design project and more an infrastructure project: creating the conditions for the whole product org to ship accessibly by default.

The Challenge

The main challenge wasn't technical — it was operational. Retrofitting accessibility onto existing products while simultaneously preventing new issues from being introduced requires buy-in at every level and processes that don't slow teams down.

The hardest part: making accessibility feel like a quality bar, not a checklist.

Approach

I started with a full audit of the product suite against WCAG 2.1 AA, triaged findings by severity and user impact, and built a backlog that engineering could work from without a16ny specialist involvement on every ticket.

From there I established:

• A component-level accessibility spec woven into the design system
• Automated testing gates in CI (axe-core) so regressions couldn't ship
• A lightweight review process for new features at the design stage, before code was written
• A quarterly training program for designers and engineers

Outcome

Within 12 months the product reached WCAG 2.1 AA compliance across core user flows. Automated test coverage caught regressions before they reached QA. The design system components became the go-to reference for accessibility patterns across the org.

More importantly: teams stopped asking "is this accessible?" and started asking "how do we make this accessible?" — a meaningful cultural shift.