Meet the team: Craig Abbott
Posted on in Meet the team
Meet Craig Abbott, another friendly face supporting the charming Northern arm of TetraLogical.
His home office comprises of several laptops, about 30 pairs of artfully arranged trainers, and two giant fluffy cats to lend a supportive paw on every team call.
Craig Abbott is a Principal Accessibility Specialist at TetraLogical, where he focuses on embedding accessibility into organisational policies, processes, and culture. With a deep commitment to sustainable accessibility, Craig helps organisations scale their efforts beyond compliance, ensuring accessibility is built in from the start, not bolted on at the end.
Before joining TetraLogical, Craig was Head of Accessibility at the UK’s Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), one of the largest government departments. There, he established a dedicated accessibility practice and led the department’s accessibility strategy. His work focused on compliance, education, and culture change, transforming policies and empowering teams to sustainably deliver accessible services. Among his many achievements, Craig created the DWP Accessibility Manual and open-sourced the first versions to support others across the public sector.
Craig’s journey into accessibility is particularly unconventional. An early fascination with computers led him to tinker with Locomotive BASIC on an old Amstrad CPC 664 and later learn HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to customise his MySpace page. He expected to pursue a career in computer science. But traditional education didn’t suit his learning style; something he later understood was linked to undiagnosed ADHD and autism. Instead, Craig took a detour into engineering, spending his early career fixing buses.
Far from being wasted time, Craig credits his years as a mechanic with teaching him persistence and problem-solving
You can’t just scrap a vehicle because you can’t figure out what’s wrong with it. You keep debugging until you do.
Craig Abbott, Principal Accessibility Specialist
That mindset served him well when he pivoted into the digital world, first through freelance web and graphic design, then at a scrappy startup where he wore many hats, from frontend developer to customer support.
Craig entered the Civil Service in 2015 as an Interaction Designer and discovered accessibility through a Government Digital Service (GDS) Academy session with Alistair Duggin. He found himself excited to learn how to make things work for more people but also ashamed of how much inaccessible content he'd probably built previously. He quickly became the go-to person for accessibility in his department, running talks, workshops, clinics, and eventually building an entire accessibility practice.
Craig later joined Elastic, an open-source AI search company, as Design Manager and Accessibility Lead for enterprise cybersecurity software before coming to TetraLogical to work alongside lots of colleagues he'd met previously once he ventured into accessibility.
Outside of work, Craig is a passionate wildlife photographer with a particular fondness for birds of prey. He takes regular trips to Scotland to photograph white-tailed sea eagles and ospreys. He’s also a regular on the conference circuit, having spoken at events including Accessibility Scotland, AxeCon, UX London, Frontend North, and Access Given.
What’s the one thing you wish you’d known when you started learning about accessibility?
That most accessibility issues are introduced during the design phase. People often think WCAG is all about code and testing, but design decisions—like font styling, headings, colour contrast, or the use of drag-and-drop interactions—have a massive impact.
Designers are often closest to users, and known for their empathy. We should lead by example. If we make our designs accessible from the outset, there’s less risk they’ll become inaccessible during development. But if the design isn’t accessible, there’s no chance the final product will be.
What’s your top accessibility tip?
There’s no such thing as “100% accessible.” What works for one person may not work for another. WCAG 2.2 AA is a baseline, not a guarantee of usability. You can meet every checkpoint and still exclude people through poor language, jargon, or design patterns.
Accessibility is about people, not checklists. Most legal challenges come from complaints, not failed audits. If you test with real users—including those with disabilities, you’ll know whether your product is actually usable. Compliance is important, but usability is everything.
What’s your top accessibility resource?
I don't know if I could pick just one!
For design, I think it’s good to have guiding principles. Tools and books will go out of date, but principles which underpin what we do should move with the times:
- Inclusive Design Principles by Henny Swan, Ian Pouncey, Heydon Pickering and Leonie Watson
- Principles of Web Accessibility by Heydon Pickering
For development, I really like PolyPane. It helps you catch lots of bugs early on, with tools that let you:
- View multiple viewports at the same time
- Emulate things like dark mode, contrast and reduce-motion easily
- Highlight missing meta data
- Check accessibility by selecting colours, viewing focus order, headings and hidden content
For testing, I love a bunch of A11y tools by our very own Lloydi. I love that they’re powerful, yet uncomplicated. I don’t have to run a page scan from DevTools, or sign-up to a mailing list, they’re just there when I need them. They include:
- Isolator
- Show focus styles
- Element inspector
- Lost focus alert
Find out more about TetraLogical, the team, our principles and our community.