Collibra's First A11y Program

Background

When I joined Collibra as Senior Product Design Manager, accessibility (A11y) oversight was fragmented throughout the company. Although another UX manager was liaising with an external vendor, Level Access, there was no formalized strategy or centralized expertise in WCAG standards. The most recent Accessibility Conformance Reports (ACRs) were over a year old. Recognizing the need for leadership, I volunteered my design team, which was already spearheading the UI redesign and design system, to take ownership of and create an A11y program. The company was eager to build a comprehensive, sustainable solution, and my team stepped in to lead the way.

A major challenge was the prevailing belief that "making a product compliant" was a one-time project with a start and end date, rather than an ongoing effort, akin to security compliance or bug fixing.

Goals

We needed to establish baseline accessibility metrics for both the existing platform and the upcoming UI and frontend architecture. Our target was to achieve 75% WCAG 2.2 compliance within a year of the new UI's launch. Our strategy included:

Enabling in-house A11y testing capabilities.
Educating and empowering engineers, designers, and writers on accessibility best practices.
Creating sustainable processes for continuous compliance.
Establishing clear lines of communication via Slack and email for accessibility support.
Ensuring access to educational materials and documentation for all employees.

Key Achievements

12%

Issues remediated in 6 weeks: Our pilot program demonstrated significant progress, validating the value of ongoing A11y work.

$10M

Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) saved by addressing accessibility concerns with two large clients.

0 to 1

I created a central, formalized, productive team out of next to nothing.

Tangible Results

We started to foster a proactive accessibility culture across the organization.
Collibra demonstrated to customers that accessibility improvements were underway, helping retain clients.
We laid the foundation for a sustainable A11y program, with processes that would evolve as the company and platform grew, and enhanced enablement for individuals to become accessibility champions.
Integrated tools/integrations with Level Access, Lighthouse, Deque, and Figma plugins, Contrast, Stark , and more.

How it Started

In December 2022, upon evaluating Collibra’s A11y status, we found that while some testing was being conducted through Level Access, there was no structured approach for achieving compliance or addressing issues holistically across the 20+ scrum teams in Product and Engineering. However, the new design system, UI redesign, and front-end architecture provided a natural opportunity to prioritize accessibility while these initiatives were underway.

Positives

Module and use case testing had been completed for key areas of the new front-end architecture on the old system.
Axe DevTools from Deque was integrated into all components and tokens within the design system.
We had an established partnership with Level Access, providing access to consultants and monthly webinars on various topics.

Challenges

The use cases used for the audit were redundant and did not give us a good representation of the entire platform.
Accessibility issues were scattered, with no consistent process for proactive design or remediation.
The sales and support teams were providing different, sometimes conflicting, answers to customers' A11y-related questions.

Creating the Foundation

Educating leadership on accessibility proved to be one of the biggest challenges. Many viewed A11y as a "quick fix" issue—adjusting colors or adding alt text—rather than a complex, ongoing initiative. Additionally, convincing decision-makers that investing in A11y for a soon-to-be-deprecated platform wasn’t cost-effective required a shift in focus. We shifted our attention to building accessibility into the new UI from the ground up.

Quote: "People choose with emotion." - Felix Van de Maele, CEO, Collibra

Laying the Groundwork for the Ideal State

To establish a long-term A11y program, we prioritized sustainability:

Education: We provided resources and training on accessibility best practices for all relevant teams.
Audits: We set up regular third-party audits to establish baselines and track compliance.
Processes: We created clear procedures for addressing compliance issues, designing for accessibility from the start, and testing with assistive technologies.
Access: We also built a Single Source of Truth (SSOT) repository where audit results, RFP FAQs, and best practice guides were stored.

Gaining Buy-In

The turning point came when enterprise and government clients began voicing concerns over outdated ACRs. This feedback helped secure buy-in from senior leadership, enabling us to prioritize the most critical compliance issues. By collaborating closely with our customers, we were able to focus on the A11y needs with the most immediate impact.

With momentum on our side, the newly formed guild came to be known as the #a11ygators. We may or may not have created some concepts for swag.

Compliance Progress

Once the new UI architecture entered Public Beta with over 100 customers, we initiated the first comprehensive accessibility audits. These audits combined automated and manual testing across 6 key workflows and over 70 modules, providing valuable insights into compliance gaps and guiding our remediation efforts.

Forming the A11y Guild

With growing internal support, we established the A11y Guild, a cross-functional team responsible for ongoing accessibility efforts. This group included engineers, designers, and content writers, all working together to ensure accessibility remained a key focus in every release. We introduced dedicated Slack channels and Confluence spaces to foster collaboration and transparency, and we set a regular cadence for ACRs to maintain compliance.

Seeing Results

With a centralized team to kick off the program, the team focused on tackling critical issues in compliance categories that had a high frequency of issues. The team worked on two parallel tracks; Issue Remediation, Process/Tooling.

The team successfully fixed 63 critical issues holistically across the platform in the first 6 weeks of working together. To this day, the team continues to build up a backlog of improvements, and remediate issues in an effort to reach 80% compliance by end of 2024. Creating plans that will enable all of Product and Engineering to successfully, design, write, code, and test following a central set of guidelines and principles is in the process of being rolled out.

Org chart diagram showing that the newly formed team is centrally governed and works outwards with other teams, and takes input from all the teams it works with.

Goodbyes and Testimonials

Image of goodbye message from Collibra designers, engineers, and leaders to Nick Conflitti. They're all praising of his hard work, leadership, and transformation of his team and the designs he oversaw.

Collibra: Building Their First Accessibility Program