Accessibility isn’t a niche. It affects everyone, from the person using a screen reader to an employee who needs an inclusive workplace, to a customer who wants to use a website without getting stuck.
Accessibility must be a mindset for every designer, developer, tester, marketer, product manager, and procurement team. If you touch a digital experience at any point in its lifecycle, you influence its accessibility.
Those are just two of my takeaways from reading How to Avoid Boiling the Accessibility Ocean. But what stood out most for me was the idea of temporarily placing (or embedding) accessibility experts directly within teams to work with them on actual accessibility challenges in their daily workflows. They provide support, expertise, guidance, and the right tools to empower team members to become accessibility champions in their own field.
So, How Does This Work?
This approach brings accessibility expertise directly into the team while the work is happening. An accessibility specialist temporarily joins the designers, developers, and product teams building a feature or product. They sit in on planning and reviews, answer questions in real time, and give feedback while fixes are still easy to make, not after launch, when everything is more complicated and expensive.
Along the way, they help the team harness what they already do well, where the gaps are, and how to close them. The goal isn’t to fix things for the team, but to guide them as they start identifying and addressing accessibility issues on their own. Once the team can do that confidently, the specialist can then step back.
With this approach comes a well-defined endpoint. The accessibility expert is not a permanent member of them. They are there to educate, help build skills and confidence, and then move on to the next team.
That’s where the shift happens. Accessibility stops being someone else’s job. Designers and developers start catching issues early, making better decisions, and solving problems as part of their everyday work. And because the people building the product are the same people learning how to make it accessible, the work moves much faster and more smoothly.
It’s really all about knowledge transfer, the process of moving know-how, skills, and context from one person or team to another, so work can continue and improve without chaos and guesswork. Accessibility expertise is shared, ownership spreads, everyone becomes part of the solution, and accessibility actually scales.
Every decision shapes whether someone with a disability can use, understand, and benefit from what you’ve built. When accessibility is treated as a collective mindset instead of a handoff, the result is digital content, products, and services that work better for everyone.
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A human author creates the DubBlog posts. The AI tools Gemini and ChatGPT are sometimes used to brainstorm subject ideas, generate blog post outlines, and rephrase certain portions of the content. Our marketing team carefully reviews all final drafts for accuracy and authenticity. The opinions and perspectives expressed remain the sole responsibility of the human author.
