Atlassian · Design Lead
What started as an org-wide accessibility audit (VPATs), took a turn from audit to creating a strategy for A11y as an embedded Atlassian practice — unblocking public-sector and enterprise sales along the way.
Context
To make Atlassian's Data Center products truly enterprise-grade, they had to work for every user. What we discovered during the VPAT process spurred us to create a vision for operationalizing inclusion. To make it successful, we needed to touch community, culture, and practices.
Accessibility had to be retrofitted into a legacy platform at scale — a steep technical and organizational hurdle. Critical bugs were blocking vital public-sector and enterprise deals, and there was no shared, sustainable process for keeping products accessible over time.
A coordinated, org-wide push — audit, remediation, and transparent documentation — could unblock those deals immediately, and turn accessibility from a one-off audit into an ongoing, embedded practice.
The Audit
We assessed 40 core user flows against WCAG 2.1 AA, scoring every area and surfacing the issues that mattered most — turning a vague mandate into a concrete, prioritized picture of exactly where the platform stood.
Building Empathy
Regular listening sessions with people who rely on screen readers, keyboard navigation, and other assistive tech kept the work grounded in lived experience — so fixes solved real problems, not just checklist items.
Culture & Leadership
Accessibility wasn't a side project. Leadership set it as an explicit goal — with dedicated OKRs and regular Town Hall moments — giving teams the mandate and momentum to treat accessibility as everyone's responsibility.
The Vision
The lasting outcome wasn't a one-time fix — it was a new way of working. We mapped out a cross-functional accessibility team, pairing dedicated designers, engineers, and a product manager, with shared rituals, tooling, and acceptance criteria — so accessibility became a first-class input into discovery, design reviews, implementation, and QA, not a late-stage audit.
