How we turned an accessibility problem into a £106k product
Eighteen months ago we rolled out our accessibility audit. Last year it made £106,000. What I love about it is that it does two things at once: it makes our clients' websites more accessible, and it creates real, sustained work and revenue for our team. Those two things don't always go together, but with this product they do, and that's why I wanted to write about how it came to be.
Where it started
My accessibility journey started in 2018, when new legislation came in requiring public sector websites to meet WCAG AA compliance. At the time I was a UX and UI designer who also worked as a front end developer, which turned out to be exactly the right place to sit. I understood the design decisions, I understood the code that had to implement them, and I could see where the two didn't line up.
I knew I needed to learn more, so I did. And once I had that knowledge, my first job wasn't to build a product. It was to build a culture.
Building the knowledge in the agency
We were a smaller agency back then, so I was doing QA as well as design, which meant I had visibility over everything going out the door. As I learned more about accessibility, I started running talks internally, teaching people how to use assistive technologies, how to run automated testing properly, and how to actually put themselves in the shoes of the users who depend on accessible experiences rather than just ticking a compliance box.
Teams got better. Sites got better. But one person teaching everyone else doesn't scale, so the next step was building a network of accessibility champions across every discipline in the agency, not just design and development. Each champion became an advocate in their own team, and critically, they learned how to have the right conversations with clients about what level of compliance actually made sense.
That conversation matters more than people think. Clients would often come to us asking for WCAG AAA. Once they understood the amount of work AAA actually involves, they nearly always settled on AA instead. Which meant our AA compliance needed to be genuinely strong, not just good enough to get by.
From practice to product
The audit itself grew directly out of testing our own work. We built a spreadsheet covering every WCAG criterion, and we use it to test templates rather than every single page. That's only possible because our components are repeatable: fix an accessibility issue in one module and that fix is inherited everywhere that module appears across the site. It's a structural way of working that makes the audit far more efficient than checking page by page.
Around that framework we built a proper structure: a reusable audit process, with content tailored to each client so it never feels generic. We always take the client on the journey with us, giving them the context behind each issue rather than just handing them a list of faults. From there we build a backlog of tickets that feeds into their continuous improvement backlog, so the work doesn't stop at the audit. It becomes an ongoing cycle of fixing and iterating.
Where it's got us
Getting this good at accessibility, both in how we test and how we fix, led to three of our client sites landing in the Silktide top ten most accessible charity websites, and seven in the top twenty. That's been one of the proudest projects of my career, and it's the moment I realised all the work we'd put in had actually amounted to something.
It's also what led to me become part os BIMA 100's Class of 2025 as Champion for Change and to me now sitting on the BIMA Inclusion Council.
None of this started as a plan to build a product. It started as a plan to make our own work better. The product came later, once we realised what we'd built was something other agencies simply didn't have.
