Design leaders unpack how accessibility unlocks business value

Featuring original research, insider frameworks, and practical advice from seven senior design executives across Target, Warner Music Group, U.S. Bank, and The Cigna Group.

Why impactful accessibility requires more than compliance

While complying with accessibility is important, the organizations realizing positive business outcomes have shifted how they frame accessibility. For example, at Target accessibility has become a core part of company values.

“You might have heard Target reference ‘Design for all’. When we think about that notion of ‘all’, accessibility is a core element,” says Purvi Shah, VP and Head of UX Design at Target.

Similarly, the design team at The Cigna Group intentionally decided not to approach accessibility as a compliance requirement. Director of Digital Equity, Jamie Revelle, championed accessibility as an enterprise-wide discipline and business opportunity. She put in the work to change minds and behaviors internally.

“Accessibility had been nothing more than a checklist. So, we talked a lot about customer trust, meaningful engagement, efficiency, long-term understanding, and then growth,” says Christina Vallery, Chief Design Officer at The Cigna Group. “We talked about how designing experiences that work for more people makes them work better for everyone. And then we anchored on metrics we could visibly claim.”

“We have been increasingly moving accessibility upstream in our product design and development practice. It’s really not just about compliance or QA; it’s about how we work. If somebody is still excluded, it means we haven’t effectively finished the design process.”

U.S. Bank frames accessibility as a revenue conversation

Marissa Woodbeck, Head of Digital Accessibility, Experience Design at U.S. Bank, leaned into the spending power of people with disabilities to shift the internal conversation from compliance to ROI. She pointed to the “purple dollar” as a growing market opportunity.

“I told my business partners they were leaving money on the table by not making sure products are accessible,” said Woodbeck. “We get a return on our investment when we make sure products are accessible at U.S. Bank.”

Framed as serving a large and expanding customer base, accessibility became a revenue conversation, not just a risk conversation.

How to connect accessibility to business metrics in enterprise product development

Measurement hits differently when it aligns with what stakeholders already care about. Rather than inventing new accessibility metrics, the design leaders interviewed report tying accessibility to delivery speed, engineering efficiency, and existing performance indicators.

Hiding the vegetables at Warner Music Group

Many of Goldschmidt’s peers in leadership at Warner Music Group are ex-Google employees. She says starting with a metric they already trust, like Google Lighthouse scores, helped create familiarity around how success is being measured. Further, aligning accessibility with metrics leadership is already invested in, like engineering efficiency, is more effective than introducing entirely new ones. Goldschmidt calls this “hiding the vegetables.”

“Digital transformations take time. And so, the efficiency of our engineering team was already being tracked by my engineering peers, my boss, the CEO, and even the board,” she says. “We built accessibility in design systems, and that became a great enabler of engineering efficiency and speed. We can measure that through adoption of components, which is a metric people aren’t going to question and will be excited about and use.”

“The best advice I can give to someone who’s trying to build a business case for accessibility is to understand what matters to the people you’re trying to convince.”

Using outcomes to shift perceptions at The Cigna Group

At The Cigna Group, accessibility was tied to measurable outcomes like fewer usability issues, fewer support requests, higher customer satisfaction, and increased user confidence. Over time, metrics evolved into indicators that engineers could claim, including fewer retrofits, faster delivery, and systems that scaled more easily across channels. According to Vallery, “Accessibility stopped being seen as an added cost, and it started to be understood as a quality signal.”

How to go from building an accessibility business case to building a sustainable practice

Once enterprise leaders buy into the value of accessibility, the next challenge is operationalizing it. Before teams can make progress, there’s often one big objection to overcome: speed.

“Early on, there was a real concern around whether accessibility would slow down how we do the work at Target,” says Jake Konerza, Senior Director, Digital Accessibility at Target. “I’m really excited that we’ve been able to prove exactly the opposite.”

The team achieved this by moving from a centralized reactive model to one where accessibility is built into daily work. Accessibility consultants are embedded directly within the product squads designing digital experiences at Target.

“Consultants are involved throughout the entire product lifecycle,” says Konerza. “So, accessibility is not a checkpoint at the end. It’s simply how we show up and work every single day.”

Target supports the ongoing success of its decentralized model through three practices:

1. Early engagement

The digital accessibility team works with designers before they start building, providing direction on accessibility issues to consider as they’re coding and designing. “We prevent issues before they occur, which is a big part of what allows us to move really quickly,” says Konerza.

2. Shared ownership

Accessibility consultants are the experts who guide and enable, but product design and engineering teams are also accountable for delivering accessible solutions. “We’re looking to scale the shared ownership through things like an accessibility champions program, which is entering our third year here at Target, and we’re scaling this up across our global footprint,” says Konerza.

3. Continuous validation

The team at Target continuously monitors digital products to maintain quality. “Our accessibility team identified a checkout button that created a blocker for assistive technology users. When we flagged and fixed it, we saw sales increase far beyond what we would have expected simply from assistive technology users. That showed us that we uncovered a broader usability issue,” says Konerza.

“Excellence means designing governance that helps teams succeed. Strong central leadership paired with distributed responsibility is what allows accessibility to scale. It’s not because one team touches everything but because the organization as a whole becomes more capable, confident, and accountable for building inclusive experiences.”

Warner Music Group seizes an opportunity to scale accessibility

Warner Music Group relied on 60+ apps and products to take care of key functions, like music distribution. When a mandate to centralize tooling came into play, product and design teams took the opportunity to embed accessibility from the start.

“We came up with WMG One, which is a central resource we use internally for a lot of the jobs to be done through our labels,” says Cody Evol, Director, Product Design at Warner Music Group. “We used the creation of this platform to bake in accessibility from the very beginning, rather than treating it as a downstream requirement. We attacked accessibility head on, making sure that we deliver a consistent experience across multiple regions for a global audience.”

How to accelerate accessibility progress through lived experience

Understanding the real experiences of people with disabilities is a powerful way to scale accessibility across teams.

• At The Cigna Group, leaders intentionally expose product teams to people navigating digital products using assistive technologies. “We’ve found that to be extremely impactful and a super-important part of really growing the culture,” says Revelle.
• Target takes a similar approach through accessibility tear downs. When redesigning its highly visual native iOS homepage, the team brought together product, engineering, and UX leaders to experience the interface through a screen reader. “It was such an empathy-building seismic moment for us, helping them experience it firsthand,” says Shah. “We cut down discussion and debate cycles just by opening up that process.”
• U.S. Bank embeds this type of engagement directly into innovation and design workflows. Teams partner with accessibility consultants to run assistive technology demonstrations and inclusive design ideation sessions. In one case, consultants uncovered a barrier in mobile check deposit that both automated and manual testing had missed. This led to Automatic Image Capture and voice prompts, improving completion for all customers.

“Working directly with people with disabilities over time has rebuilt gaps our teams would not have anticipated through standards or testing alone,” says Woodbeck. “Those lived experiences challenge assumptions on how users navigate, interpret, and complete tasks, especially in complex digital flows.”

Four ways enterprise teams build accessibility into how they work

Accessibility scales when it’s built into how teams already work. Across the organizations interviewed, four themes consistently emerged:

1. Shared ownership trumps centralized control

How it works: Responsibility for accessibility is distributed across product, design, and engineering teams. If a central team is in place, it’s there to set direction, not review everything.

Real-world example: The Cigna Group has a center of excellence that sets standards and raises the bar on quality, making it easier to do accessibility well across the enterprise. They push ownership outwards, making product teams, designers, engineers, and researchers accountable for accessibility in their day-to-day work.

2. Use accessibility in design systems to scale what works

How it works: Embedding accessibility in design systems allows teams to adopt accessible components and patterns by default.

Real-world example: Warner Music Group embedded accessibility into a new design system powering software used by label executives and A&R teams. As teams preferred to use the more modern, intuitive experience over older systems, accessibility scaled naturally.

3. Activate champions and accountability

How it works: Accessibility knowledge is shared through training, roundtables, and internal enablement so teams can design accessible experiences without relying on specialists.

Real-world example: At U.S. Bank, the accessibility team focuses on education and organization-wide training to build champions and enable designers to deliver accessible experiences independently.

4. Embed accessibility into everyday workflows

How it works: Accessibility becomes part of design critiques, planning, and development rather than a final checkpoint.

Real-world example: At Target, accessibility consultants are embedded within product squads and involved throughout the lifecycle. This makes accessibility part of everyday design and development, not a final checkpoint.

As accessibility becomes embedded in the enterprise product development cycle, the benefits grow—but so do the stakes. This is particularly true as AI accelerates how digital experiences are created and scaled.

“Inclusive design became part of how we innovate, not an exception. The long-term result is better products, stronger adoption, and innovation that works for more people from the start.”

How AI can scale exclusion

AI accelerates how we build, but accessibility keeps us grounded in who we’re building for. By failing to consider inclusion when building AI solutions, enterprises can unintentionally create exclusion at scale. Accessibility is becoming foundational to trust, oversight, transparency, and ethical design in an AI era.

“Accessibility must evolve beyond interface-level concerns to include ethics, transparency, human oversight, and adaptable experiences — especially as AI agents, voice interfaces, and new devices emerge,” says Vallery. “If accessibility isn’t considered during model training or system design, things like bias and usability gaps don’t stay contained. They become amplified across every interaction, every channel, and every downstream use case, because that surface area is so much larger.”

“I think one of the biggest risks people underestimate is how quickly AI is really changing the scale and speed of change. It challenges everything we know, all our work, and the platforms we’ve invested in.”

U.S. Bank embeds accessibility into its AI strategy

Woodbeck agrees that AI introduces risk if accessibility isn’t built in. “We realized that inaccessible AI increases late-stage rework, regulatory exposure, and delivery delays,” she says. “To address this, U.S. Bank embedded accessibility directly into its AI strategy.”

The organization created an AI agent that supports designers early in the process, helps enforce accessibility governance across the product lifecycle, and flags issues before development. AI is treated as a governed asset with standards, review, and versioning, while humans remain accountable and in the loop. “Strong accessibility foundations have made AI safe for us to scale at U.S. Bank,” says Woodbeck.

Your turn: shift accessibility to a core business capability

Whether you’re just starting to get buy-in for accessibility or working to mature your practice, learning from teams that have already done the work can get you where you need to be faster—and with fewer stumbles along the way.

The insights shared in this article only scratch the surface of what’s possible. Download your copy of The Accessibility Advantage report to access 60 pages of research-backed guidance, real-world examples, and practical frameworks from organizations at every stage of accessibility maturity.

Want to watch the full discussion that informed this article, featuring design leaders from Target, Warner Music Group, U.S. Bank, and The Cigna Group? Access the recording below.