Accessibility — 2025
Verity Accessibility Retrofit
A procurement deadline, three hundred and forty screens, and no appetite for a rewrite.
WCAG 2.2 AA across 340 screens without rebuilding the product.
- Client
- Verity Insurance
- Discipline
- Accessibility remediation at scale
- Engagement
- 9 months, Jan to Sep 2025
- Team
- Five engineers, one QA specialist, two assistive technology testers
Overview
Verity had eleven months to reach WCAG 2.2 AA or lose a public sector contract. The product was seven years old, 340 screens, with accessibility handled inconsistently and mostly by accident.
The instinct in the room was a rebuild. A rebuild would not have finished in eleven months, and it would have introduced new problems while fixing old ones. We retrofitted instead, and finished with seven weeks to spare.
Role
Accessibility design lead, contract
9 months, Jan to Sep 2025 · Five engineers, one QA specialist, two assistive technology testers
- Full audit of 340 screens against WCAG 2.2 AA
- Remediation triage by user impact and fix cost
- Redesign of colour, focus and form-error systems
- Accessible patterns for the twelve most repeated components
- Sessions with screen reader and switch-access users
- Design review checklist adopted by the whole product team
Problem
The audit found 1,140 distinct issues. Presented as a list, that number stops a programme dead before it starts.
Most of the issues were also not unique. They were the same eleven mistakes repeated across a large product: contrast below threshold on secondary text, focus indicators removed by a global reset, form errors conveyed by colour alone, icon-only buttons with no accessible name. Fixing the pattern fixed hundreds of instances at once.
Process
Auditing by pattern, not by page
I grouped the 1,140 issues by root cause. Eleven causes covered 82% of them. That turned an unmanageable backlog into eleven pieces of work with a predictable shape.
Fixing the tokens first
Six colour tokens moved to meet contrast, which resolved 380 issues in a single change without a designer touching a screen. The remaining palette was adjusted to keep the brand recognisable at the new values.
Restoring focus properly
A single global reset had removed focus outlines everywhere in 2019. Replacing it with a consistent, high-contrast focus style that clears both light and dark surfaces fixed keyboard navigation across the entire product.
Testing with the people affected
Two paid assistive technology testers, one screen reader user and one switch-access user, joined every second sprint review. They found things automated tooling cannot: a form that was technically conformant and practically unusable because of the order in which it announced errors.
Making it stick
The last deliverable was a fourteen-point design review checklist and a workshop for the whole product team. Retrofits regress unless somebody changes the habit that produced them.
Outcomes
- AA
- WCAG 2.2 conformance across all 340 screens
- 1,140
- Issues resolved from eleven root causes
- 380
- Fixed by changing six colour tokens
- 7 weeks
- Delivered ahead of the procurement deadline
Two assistive technology testers were paid at full consulting rate throughout. That was a budget line I insisted on, and it is the reason the result holds up in real use rather than only in an audit tool.
Gallery
Tools
- Figma
- Axe DevTools
- NVDA
- VoiceOver
- Stark
- Storybook
