Scaling expert accessibility auditing in 8 weeks
Veera received a government grant to help make accessibility more accessible. I turned their specialist knowledge of accessibility auditing into a structured knowledge base, a product, and a system that would scale for organisations.
- Role
- Sole designer and developer, with two client-side accessibility experts as domain partners
- Project Type
- Research, information architecture, product design, production code
- Timeframe
- 8 weeks, 2026
- Outcome
- 1 of 6 funded from 160 applications. Launched, now in pilot.
- User Research
- Information Architecture
- Content Design
- Product Design
- Development
The problem
Accessibility consultancy doesn’t scale, and the twenty-page report it produces doesn’t convert into action. Both things organisations already do fail on both counts — my client had tried self-assessment across 42 site managers and abandoned it.
The decision
I built the audit grouped by accessibility category, the way the standards are filed. Testing with an experienced assessor showed why that failed: doing all the lighting at once means walking the whole site, then walking it again for doors.
Before · organised by item category
After · organised by physical route
I restructured around physical routes. Car park to front door, entrance to service desk. Same content, same standards, only the axis changed — you stand in one place once and answer everything that applies there.
The structure that’s right for maintaining content is almost never the structure that’s right for using it.
Users showed me the symptom. I worked out what was structurally wrong, and what absorbing it would cost with four weeks left before a public launch.
Launched, and in pilot
A multi-tenant product with two surfaces over one knowledge base. Launched July 2026 at the Access Activator showcase, and now in pilot.
A selection outcome, not proof of behaviour change — I set a 40% time-reduction target at the start and instrumented for it before anyone asked me to.