Context
At Ada, working on a medical product meant accessibility wasn't a nice-to-have—it was core to the mission. Early questions kept surfacing: Was the native app truly accessible? Were VoiceOver labels correct and useful? Knowledge was concentrated in a handful of experienced colleagues, with no shared forum to close the gap.
What I Built
I founded and led the Accessibility Guild—a recurring, biweekly open forum anchored by the company's most accessibility-knowledgeable individuals. Averaging 10 ****to 15 attendees per session, these were hands-on working sessions focused on reviewing live designs, fielding real questions, and solving accessibility problems together in the moment.
Key Outcomes & Strategic Impact
I am incredibly grateful for the skills and dedication of the guild that made this possible. Together, here are the milestones I am proudest to have championed:
- Comprehensive Mobile Audit & Strategic Pivot: Led a cross-team collaborative audit specifically targeting the mobile app, which suffered from severe accessibility debt. The audit catalogued and severity-ranked every issue, revealing the mobile app was in critical shape. This hard data drove a major strategic initiative: we decided to leverage our much more accessible web product's SDK and completely refactor the native mobile app.
- World Accessibility Day 2024 Conference: Organized and executed a full-scale internal conference that drew 70 to 100 company attendees. Managed significant cross-functional logistics to feature 6 external speakers from various companies and nations (Linkedin, Co-op and more).
The poster for the GAAD24 conference I organized.
- Process Standardization: Drove the standardization of accessibility design specs and engineer communication across my team, the web team, and the design system team. During the audit, we surfaced a QA engineer's individual spec process and collaboratively refined it into the organization's newly adopted standard.
- Cultural Transformation: Turned a scattered, expert-gatekept practice into an open, ongoing forum. This shift established accessibility as a shared, transparent responsibility across the entire product organization.