Background
Accessibility makes tools, content, activities, and environments available, usable, and meaningful for as many people as possible, including people with disabilities. An estimated 1.3 billion people worldwide live with disabilities, or about 16% of the global population. Recognizing this significant user base, at Microsoft Teams, I led the program design, operations, and change management for making our platform truly accessible to everyone.
Working closely with leads from design, engineering, and product management, we set about "shifting left" to embed inclusive design and accessibility deeply into every phase of the process, not just as an afterthought.
Challenges
When we began, accessibility efforts faced several interconnected challenges: specs were introduced too late in the design lifecycle, leading to reactive fixes rather than proactive solutions. Additionally, errors often stemmed from misunderstandings of complex requirements, while the overall approach focused too heavily on documentation rather than customer-centered, inclusive design.
There was no established process for inclusive design walkthroughs, and the existing spec approach needed a complete overhaul to support teams and users better. To address these systemic issues, we launched several key initiatives.
Accessibility Champ Program
We launched the Accessibility Champs Program to scale accessibility efforts and create a culture of accountability. This initiative established a network of advocates and experts across design, product, and engineering teams who played a critical role in embedding accessibility into their workflows.
These champs provided localized guidance, collaborated with stakeholders to address accessibility issues, and signed off on design specs. Most importantly, they became advocates for inclusive, customer-centered design principles, ensuring our experiences were efficient, intuitive, and accessible.
By decentralizing accessibility expertise and empowering champs as local advocates, the program significantly amplified the impact of accessibility efforts across the organization. At the end of 2024, we have 90+ champs!
Bootcamps
To help Accessibility Champs grow into their roles as advocates, I co-designed and facilitated bootcamps designed specifically for their needs. These sessions offered in-depth training on the accessibility design-to-development process, with hands-on opportunities to apply our updated inclusive design approaches and tools. We ran the bootcamps in person across Vancouver, Redmond, Prague, and Bangalore, ensuring that champs had the knowledge and confidence to guide their teams effectively. These bootcamps were crucial in scaling accessibility expertise and embedding inclusive design practices across the organization.
Accessibility Design Summits
To engage the broader organization, I led the planning and logistics of three Accessibility Design Summits across North America, Asia, and Europe. The format included fireside chats, lightning talks, and expert panel discussions. These summits brought together teams from across disciplines and geographies to connect, share best practices, and tackle challenges in embedding accessibility into product development. By providing a platform for collaboration and alignment, the summits fostered a shared commitment to accessibility as a core design principle, helping to build a stronger, more inclusive culture across the organization.
Tooling
Alongside building human capacity, we also focused on the tools teams needed to support inclusive design practices. We introduced and optimized a suite of tools that made accessibility a natural part of the workflow:
Inclusive Design Walkthroughs in Figma: Guided designers through accessibility checks during early design phases.
A11y Design Toolkit: A comprehensive resource with guidelines, templates, and resources for designing accessible products.
A11y Focus Order Plugin: A Figma plugin to help designers visualize and test keyboard navigation orders for assistive technology compatibility.
These tools enabled teams to incorporate accessibility into their work more seamlessly and confidently.
Process
To operationalize accessibility, I drove key process changes that embedded inclusive design into the development cycle:
Launched Inclusive Design Office Hours, where teams could receive real-time feedback on their designs, fostering a culture of iterative improvement.
Established a formal Sign-Off Review process to ensure accessibility accountability at key milestones as teams progressed through our phased release rings, where code is gradually deployed from internal testing to broader production environments. We also leveraged automated testing throughout this rollout process to catch accessibility issues early and consistently.
Partnered with our Engineering Systems team to make improvements to ADO (AzureDevOps) to reflect our new process updates.
Impact and Reflection
The impact of these initiatives has been significant and measurable:
Accessibility is now far more deeply integrated throughout the Teams design and development process, leading to more efficient workflows and better user experiences.
Office hours remain consistently fully booked, reflecting the demand for accessibility guidance and the culture shift toward prioritizing inclusive design.
Accessibility Champs actively advocate for and drive accessibility improvements, creating a ripple effect across the organization.
Looking back on this transformation, I am proud of the cultural shift we achieved. Accessibility is no longer an afterthought but a fundamental part of designing and building products. This experience reinforced my belief that inclusive design is not only essential for users with disabilities but also an opportunity to create better products for everyone.
