In my transition to leading UX in the Enterprise space, I’ve had to recalibrate my definition of ‘high-quality design’. At agencies, accessibility was often an aspirational goal, something we’d fight for budget to tackle. In a live broadcast or high-value B2B setting, that mindset is obsolete. Accessibility is not an act of goodwill; it’s a non-negotiable legal and financial barrier to entry.
We are now in a world where our largest clients—governments, major financial institutions—face their own strict regulatory scrutiny. This means our product must meet the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1, usually at the AA level, or we simply do not get paid. The argument is no longer about why we should do it; it is about how we architect our design system to guarantee compliance at scale.
The UX lead and the VPAT guarantee
When we chase an enterprise deal, the procurement team demands a Voluntary Product Accessibility Template (VPAT). This document is essentially an audit of our product against the WCAG criteria. My role, as a UX Lead, is to ensure that every decision: from typography and colour palette to component behaviour: supports that VPAT guarantee. This is a critical shift. We are no longer just designing for usability; we are designing for certifiability.
If our designs fail an external accessibility audit, the client has the contractual right to walk away or demand costly, rushed remediation. The risk is immense. This forces us to integrate accessibility into the earliest phases of the product lifecycle. It cannot be a test tacked onto the end of a sprint; it must be the specification that defines the sprint. It’s about being proactive: shifting the focus from fixing bugs to eliminating compliance risks before the first line of code is written.
Constraint as a design catalyst
I find that the most impactful work often emerges from the tightest constraints. For a long period, I listened exclusively to a single musical artist; it was a self-imposed boundary that surprisingly enhanced my creative focus and efficiency. WCAG compliance is the same kind of essential, productive constraint in product design.
When we commit to AA standards, we are forced to be better, more disciplined designers.
Colour: We are forced to choose palettes that work for strong contrast, eliminating visual ambiguity for all users, not just those with low vision.
Interaction: We must build a logical, predictable keyboard focus order. This benefits screen-reader users, but it also creates better, more efficient workflows for power users who hate touching the mouse.
Structure: We use semantic HTML correctly; this means our component library is inherently more robust and performant across different devices and bandwidths.
We must advocate for the up-front investment into the design system now. Our components should be born accessible. Retrofitting an entire enterprise application because a contract auditor found a flaw in our focus management is a tactical failure that I cannot accept. My judgement is that strong compliance is the most strategic design investment we can make in 2019 to secure our position in the enterprise market.