After GAAD: when accessibility becomes a business responsibility

Every third Thursday in May, the LinkedIn feed fills up with posts about accessibility. Hashtags, infographics, statements of intent, statistics on the billions of people with disabilities around the world. By Friday morning, in many companies, everything goes back to the way it was.

This is the paradox of Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD): never have so many people talked about accessibility, and never have so few organizations turned it into an ongoing practice.

This isn't a criticism of GAAD itself. The global day for digital accessibility, launched in 2011, deserves real credit: it brought the topic out of technical teams and into leadership conversations. The problem comes after. Once the spotlight fades, digital products go back to working well for the people who were considered during design, and poorly for everyone else.

This article tries to answer a question many leaders are asking themselves these days, but one that rarely becomes a strategic conversation. How do you build an organization that treats accessibility not as an annual event, but as an ongoing, measurable, and accountable practice?

How wide is the gap between intention and practice

The data on the gap exists, and it's uncomfortable. According to the WebAIM Million 2026 report, more than 95% of the world's most visited home pages have at least one automatically detectable accessibility error (a figure that's growing year over year, by the way).

In the European context, the landscape changed structurally on 28 June 2025, with the European Accessibility Act (EAA) coming into force. From that date, many digital products and services sold in the European Union have to meet specific accessibility requirements. Compliance is no longer just an ethical choice; it's a legal obligation.

And yet a significant share of Italian companies only moved in the months immediately before the deadline, often with stopgap fixes. The difference between those who treated compliance as a one-off project and those who built it as an ongoing practice shows up in next year's remediation budgets.

On the business side, the return on investing in accessibility is well documented. Inclusive design improves conversion rates, reduces churn, expands the natural user base, and contributes to SEO.

And yet these benefits are still rarely visible inside the business, which leads to a simple but inevitable consequence: every conversation about accessibility becomes a dialogue between people who talk about values and people who ask for numbers.

The four maturity levels of corporate accessibility

To bring accessibility onto the leadership agenda, we need a shared language that goes beyond the binary "we're compliant / we're not compliant." The model we propose has four levels: awareness, compliance, practice, culture.

Level 1: Awareness

You know accessibility exists. You may even have someone internally who keeps an eye on it. The topic lives in your stated values but not in your daily processes.

The signal that a company is stuck at this level is clear: when you ask the product team who's responsible for accessibility on the next release, the answer is "I'm not sure, it depends." Accessibility has no operational owner. It's everyone's job, which means it's no one's.

The lever for moving up is naming an owner with real authority and real resources. That means a person or a small team with the power to block a non-compliant release, not just write about it in the release notes.

Level 2: Compliance

You've run an audit, fixed the critical issues, and published an accessibility statement. You're meeting the regulations. The problem is that your compliance is static: a snapshot of a single moment, in a product that keeps evolving every two weeks.

The signal here is just as clear: every new deploy risks introducing regressions that no one catches until a user reports them.

The lever is integrating accessibility checks into the development cycle. Bring automated tests into the pipeline, build accessibility criteria into the early stages of user experience design, and train product teams to recognize barriers before they create them.

Level 3: Practice

Accessibility is now part of how you build any product. It's in the design system, in your procurement criteria when you choose a vendor, in research briefs, in sprint reviews. It no longer depends on one person: if that person goes on vacation, the system keeps running.

The lever for the next step up is bringing the topic into the places it doesn't live yet, namely the processes that involve people. Hiring, leadership, partnerships with disability organizations, and the presence of people with disabilities around decision-making tables.

Level 4: Culture

Accessibility has become part of who you are, not a technical spec. It shows up in hiring, in career plans, in vendor selection criteria, in commercial partnerships. Leadership doesn't delegate the topic to a team; they live it themselves.

"The real indicator of maturity isn't what a company publishes on GAAD, but what happens in its processes the day after. If accessibility doesn't show up in software releases, in budgets, in vendor selection, in testing with people with disabilities, and in leadership objectives, it stays at the level of communication. The challenge today is moving from awareness to measurable accountability. At Accessiway we work on exactly this: helping organizations make accessibility a stable practice, not an annual occasion," says Paolo Berro, VP of Accessibility at Accessiway.

The levers for moving the organization

There's no magic leap between one level and the next. There are specific levers, acting on four dimensions: governance, metrics, processes, people.

On governance, the decisive question is "does the person responsible for accessibility have the authority to slow down a release?" If the answer is no, the topic stays a recommendation.

On metrics, two or three KPIs on the development dashboard are enough:

• Number of open barriers on the product, and their severity level.

• Average resolution time from discovery to closure.

• Coverage of automated testing on new releases.

On processes, the difference is made by "shift left." Moving checks to the beginning of the product lifecycle, directly into the design and research phase, dramatically reduces the cost of remediation.

On people, finally, the most underrated lever is the structural presence of people with disabilities in development processes, both inside product teams and as user testers.

Three actions for Monday morning

If GAAD is the right moment to stop for a beat and look at your organization honestly, here are three concrete actions that digital leaders can put in motion by the end of next week.

The first is mapping where your company sits today on the model. It isn't a theoretical exercise: it gives the problem a name, and that's how you set priorities.

The second is identifying the business processes where accessibility is still invisible. Making them visible is the first step to improving them.

The third is adding an accessibility metric to at least one of the current quarter's OKRs. Even just one, even an imperfect one. Measurement changes behavior more than any statement of intent.

Global Accessibility Awareness Day works when it's the spark, not the destination.

After years inside these processes, our conviction is simple. Accessibility is an ongoing practice. And the difference between the companies that live it that way and the ones that celebrate it once a year shows up in the products, in the people, and increasingly in the balance sheets