Accessibility Process at Scale
How 1,000+ engineers reached 85% completion on a program I couldn't force anyone to take
The situation
Atlassian had a clear process for accessibility concerns: when a customer flagged one, it had to be verified and routed to the Central Accessibility team so it could be tracked and fixed properly.
The process existed, but people weren't using it. Reports were getting resolved informally, closed as one-offs, or never handed off at all, so tickets went missing and the central team never saw the full picture of what customers were hitting.
Fixing that meant getting over 1,000 engineers across teams that didn't report to me to build with accessibility in mind and follow the escalation path, with no lever to force adoption.
What I did
Teaching the process, not just the principles
The core gap wasn't that engineers didn't care, it was that nobody was sure what counted as an accessibility concern or where it was supposed to go. I built the training around the actual moment of decision: a customer flags something, how do you verify it, and how do you get it to the Central Accessibility team so it doesn't disappear.
That turned an abstract compliance expectation into a concrete handoff people could recognize and repeat.
Building for managers, not just engineers
Rather than design a curriculum and hope engineers found time for it, I built manager-level enablement alongside the core training. Managers got their own track, so accountability didn't rest on individual willpower, it became something their leads were reinforcing in day-to-day work, not a course competing with sprint deadlines.
Making it real, not theoretical
The training itself moved away from abstract compliance language and into scenarios engineers would actually recognize: real decisions, real tradeoffs, the kind of judgment calls that come up in a sprint, not just in a policy doc.
The result
85% completion across 1,000+ engineers, and 92% process adherence, meaning people weren't just finishing the training, they were actually verifying and routing accessibility concerns the way the process intended.
1,000+
engineers reached
85%
completion
92%
process adherence
Why accessibility matters
Roughly one in six people worldwide lives with a disability. When a product isn't accessible, those customers aren't inconvenienced, they're locked out of work they're being asked to do.
A missed accessibility ticket isn't just a tracking failure. It's a customer who reported a real barrier and got no answer, and a company that loses the signal it needs to fix the pattern instead of the one-off. For enterprise software, that also carries legal and procurement weight: accessibility standards decide whether entire organizations can buy the product at all.
That's why the process mattered as much as the awareness. Good intentions don't compound. A reliable path from customer report to central team does.
Course screenshots — coming soon