Sustainable accessibility in complex organisations: organisational realities

Posted on Friday, 7 November 2025 by Henny Swan in Strategy

Whether at the start of your accessibility journey or partway through it, complex organisations often face strategic, organisational, and external barriers that can make scaling accessibility difficult.

These challenges are common, but with the right culture, good communication, planning, and collaboration between teams, accessibility can scale in ways that are both effective and sustainable.

A good starting point for scaling sustainable accessibility is to identify your biggest pain points and look at how to reduce or remove them. These often fall into three areas:

• Strategic foundations
• Organisational realities
• External factors

In this post, we explore organisational realities and what it takes to build a culture of inclusion, open communication, and collaboration across teams and processes.

A note on EN 17161: Design for All

If you’re looking for a standards-based framework for embedding accessibility into your organisation, EN 17161: Design for All offers useful guidance. Our post Understanding EN 17161 Design for All explains the standard in more detail and is mapped to each of the sections that follow.

Organisational realities

Organisational realities such as culture, departmental politics, siloed teams, and budget constraints can all affect how accessibility is implemented, regardless of the strategic foundations in place. When tackled head-on, they can help unlock lasting change rather than act as a blocker.

Culture

By building a culture of accessibility, you shape how inclusion is understood and prioritised and whether it’s seen as everyone’s responsibility or left to a few specialists. It also influences whether teams think of accessibility as a driver of innovation or a compliance burden.

An inclusive culture goes far beyond product teams. It’s a shared mindset across the organisation, reflected in many different teams, for example:

• How Human Resources (HR) designs inclusive recruitment processes
• How procurement sets accessibility criteria for suppliers
• How legal manages risk and compliance
• How marketing and communications teams ensure accessible content
• How leadership sets expectations through strategy and tone
• How people use inclusive language when working with each other and our customers

Mapping culture and EN 17161: Design for All

Understanding EN 17161 Design for All contains more details of the following clauses:

• Clause 6: Planning
• Clause 7: Support

Change and communication

Scaling accessibility often requires shifts in mindset, habits, and ways of working across the organisation. This kind of change doesn’t happen automatically; it needs time, coordination, and clear communication.

That’s where dedicated change management and internal communication functions can make a big difference. They help teams understand not just what needs to change, but why it matters and how to make it happen.

There are a few ways to support change more effectively:

• Change managers: use change managers to embed accessibility into transformation work. If your organisation is going through broader digital, cultural, or operational change, accessibility should be part of that transformation from the start and not added in later
• Change programme: treat accessibility as an organisational change programme; even if you’re not restructuring, scaling accessibility still requires changes to roles, responsibilities, behaviours, and systems so a structured change approach can help teams adapt and stay aligned
• Internal communications: partner with your internal communications team to embed accessibility into company-wide campaigns, announcements, and messaging. This keeps accessibility visible, normalises inclusive practices, and helps shift culture
• Share success: tell stories and share successes, use internal channels to highlight accessible design wins, individual contributions, and the impact accessibility has on real people. This helps build motivation and reinforces a shared commitment

We’ve seen the value of change management firsthand when working with a global freight company at the very start of their accessibility journey. With no previous accessibility policies, processes, or training in place, the organisation needed more than just technical recommendations — it needed a shift in mindset and ways of working, starting at the very top with leadership.

We’ve also worked with change management at a broadcaster with many years of accessibility experience and expertise as they went through organisational change. The change manager played a critical role in preserving accessibility knowledge during team restructures, ensuring it wasn’t lost as people changed roles or left the organisation. They helped embed accessibility into new ways of working, updated internal processes and training, and made sure accessibility remained part of the conversation as new leadership and priorities emerged.

Mapping change, communication and EN 17161: Design for All

Understanding EN 17161 Design for All contains more details of the following clauses:

• Clause 7: Support
• Clause 6.3: Planning for changes

Departmental politics

Departmental politics can have a significant impact on how accessibility is prioritised, funded, and implemented. Competing goals, unclear ownership, or internal rivalry can slow progress and create unnecessary barriers. Even when leadership support exists, the dynamics between teams can determine whether accessibility work moves forward or gets deprioritised.

This often happens when accessibility sits between teams, for example, when product, design, or engineering each assumes another team is responsible. Without shared priorities and clear escalation routes, accessibility decisions can be delayed, diluted, or reversed, making long-term progress difficult.

There are a few ways to manage departmental politics more effectively:

• Create shared priorities: make accessibility part of cross-departmental planning so it’s not seen as a single team’s responsibility or competing objective
• Align incentives and goals: include accessibility outcomes in departmental objectives so that success depends on collaboration, not competition
• Clarify accountability: use governance structures to define who decides, who delivers, and who approves accessibility work across departments
• Encourage transparency: use shared reporting, open forums, or regular updates so accessibility progress is visible and less vulnerable to competing agendas
• Secure executive sponsorship: when senior leaders reinforce accessibility as a shared organisational goal, it’s easier for teams to align and reduce friction

Mapping departmental politics and EN 17161: Design for All

Understanding EN 17161 Design for All contains more details of the following clauses:

• Clause 6.3: Planning for changes
• Clause 8: Operation
• Clause 8.1: Operation planning and control

Siloed teams

Even in organisations where departmental priorities are aligned, accessibility can still be slowed down by teams working in silos. These are often not political divides, but structural ones caused by different systems, workflows, or locations that limit collaboration and knowledge sharing.

Siloed teams can unknowingly duplicate work, overlook accessibility requirements, or develop inconsistent approaches. People may be solving the same problems in different ways — or not solving them at all. This results in fragmented user experiences and uneven accessibility maturity across products and services.

There are a few ways to break down silos and improve consistency:

• Design systems: a central design system team creates accessible components and shares usage guidance across product teams
• Shared standards: a single set of accessibility guidelines that all teams can reference
• Cross-team training: shared training ensures everyone has a consistent understanding of accessibility principles and practices
• Accessibility champions network: a network of accessibility champions from different teams who meet regularly to share progress, align practices, and support each other’s work
• Central resources: documentation, training, and tools that are available to all teams in a central hub, ensuring accessibility knowledge is easy to find and maintain
• Shared goals: accessibility goals or key performance indicators (KPIs) that encourage collaboration across teams working on related products or services

Many organisations we work with have an accessibility champions network that can go a long way to connecting otherwise dispersed groups of people. How An Accessibility Champions Network Started The BBC’s Story by Gareth Ford-Williams offers lots of useful insights. Another great resource is the Champions of Accessibility Network, where companies and people share resources and ideas for running accessibility champion networks.

Mapping siloed teams and EN 17161: Design for All

Understanding EN 17161 Design for All contains more details of the following clauses:

• Clause 6.3: Planning for changes
• Clause 8: Operation
• Clause 8.1: Operation planning and control

Budget

Budget constraints are one of the most common organisational realities. Ideally, budgeting cycles include accessibility as standard alongside security, performance, or outsourced design and development support. If not, start early by making the business case for accessibility.

When planning your budget, consider costs such as:

• Training: accessibility training either built into team training plans or accounted for in a central training hub the whole organisation can access
• Specialist support: budget for assessments, user research with disabled people, or embedded accessibility support from third parties
• Tools: software for design and development teams, such as screen readers, automated testing tools, and plug-ins
• Recruitment: budget for recruitment support people into the team with appropriate accessibility knowledge and experience

As Felicity Miners-Jones explains in her accessible recruitment post, it's important to make each stage of the hiring process through to onboarding and beyond accessible so that you can attract the best candidates from a range of backgrounds and disabilities.

Mapping budget and EN 17161: Design for All

Understanding EN 17161 Design for All contains more details of the following clauses:

• Clause 7.1: Resources
• Clause 8.5: Control of and communication with external suppliers

Outsourcing and third parties

Outsourcing extends accessibility responsibilities beyond your direct control. To avoid accessibility being diluted or lost, requirements must be built into procurement and third-party management processes from the start.

Whether you’re buying tools, commissioning content, or contracting design and development services, procurement teams and product leads should work together to include clear accessibility expectations in briefs, selection criteria, and contracts. As part of the selection process, vendors should be asked to provide accessibility statements, test or assessment results to demonstrate they have met accessibility standards.

Once selected, product leads must ensure third parties continue to deliver against those expectations. This means monitoring quality, building accessibility into acceptance criteria, and following up where issues arise.

We've worked with customers where we've not only trained their User Experience and Design teams, but also their supplier network who support them with user research and design. This ensures there is a shared mindset, knowledge, and language they can all use when collaborating on projects.

Mapping outsourcing, third parties, and EN 17161: Design for All

Understanding EN 17161 Design for All contains more details of the following clauses:

• Clause 7.1: Resources
• Clause 8.5: Control of and communication with external suppliers

In summary

Scaling accessibility in organisations can be complex, but with the right culture, good communication, planning, and collaboration between teams, accessibility can scale in ways that are both effective and sustainable.

By taking a structured, joined-up approach, combining strategic foundations and careful management of external factors, you can scale accessibility in a way that delivers long-term value for your teams, your business, and your customers.

Next steps

Learn more about how TetraLogical can help your organisation with our Embedded accessibility service and Sustainable accessibility service.