Setting a standard for accessibility at Salesloft
Role
Senior product designer
Summary
Reaching a status of accessible compliance is a large task to take on for a website. For an entire organization it takes patience, a huge amount of folks who care about all users, and a passion for making sure our product is accessible to all.
I have lead and been a part of a continued effort to improve accessibility at Salesloft in order to reach WCAG AA standards.
Prioritizing accessibility not only improves usability for everyone but also educates design and engineering, fosters innovation, and let's all of our users know that we seriously value them.
Project overview
Throughout my five years at Salesloft, I have been a part of an ongoing initiative to improve accessibility for our customers. Aligning with our core values, accessible design puts our customers first.
Our team has been dedicated to improving accessibility, ensuring that all users—regardless of ability—can engage seamlessly. This ongoing effort has required deep collaboration between design and engineering, refining workflows, enhancing screen reader support, and optimizing keyboard navigation.
Accessible design isn’t just a best practice—it’s essential for creating inclusive experiences that empower every user. While progress has been gradual, the impact has been significant, making the tool more intuitive and usable for a wider audience. By prioritizing accessibility, we have delivered a more thoughtful and equitable experience for all.
What was the challenge?
Simply put, we weren't up to standards. We knew we had a mountain of work to do in order to reach base standards and any time we left to doing nothing, our users were suffering from it.
We weren't sure how accessible our platform was. Our design system is fully accessible and updated, meaning any new feature released was fully accessible. However, there are old parts of the platform. Code and design that hasn't been touched in a while. This leaves a disjointed experience for our users.
As time went on, we were hearing more and more requests from current and potential customers on what our accessibility package looked like. What did we have to offer?
Not enough.
Project Goals
Process
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User research
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It was time to dive into understanding what key areas were effecting our users. We were able to reference our customer feedback tools to find customers with accessibility needs. Jumping into several interviews, we began to understand what we lacked.
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Auditing
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Salesloft is a very large product with many areas to cover. Along with a few other team members comprised of engineers and product management, I built a small team to begin auditing our platform.
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Get buy in from leadership
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It is pretty tough to get buy in from one team alone on prioritizing accessibility, but getting an entire organization on board to shift their projects and focus seems impossible. The accessibility task force began vocalizing this immediately and to anyone who would listen.
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Continued education
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The more folks understand the world of accessibility and how the lack of it greatly effects our users, the more buy in we will receive. People understand it is morally right to push for this initiative. So I began sharing more and more with our product experience team. What are best practices, how are we communicating these needs to engineers, and what are the impacts to customers?
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Along with educating my colleagues, I wanted to better educate myself and signed up to be a member of the IAAP (International association of accessibility professionals) and began coursework.
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"I just became used to it."
User research - Meet Jodie
Jodie is legally blind and relies solely on keyboard navigation and a screen reader for her to work.
While interviewing, Jodie spoke about the part of her work day she was able to complete. These steps were easier to accomplish via keyboard. However, she then told us about the areas of the platform she could not reach at all, putting her behind in her work.
This led her to hire an assistant to come in with her on Sundays and help in navigating to those unreachable pages. She stated this was the only way she could catch up on her work and stay on track for the next week.
And what Jodie said next, along with every single other person we spoke to about accessibility, made me want to design to the level that they deserve. She stated how grateful she was that we even reached out to her to talk about this issue.
Unacceptable!
Auditing
From our user interviews, we were able to highlight key areas to prioritize in helping our customers with. However, there was still the rest of the platform to understand how compliant we were.
Our task force was able to break this down in a couple approaches. The first one being that engineers would audit key areas like keyboard navigation, ARIA labeling, and screen reading abilities. Designers would tackle items such as color, language and text, interactive elements, and data visualization.
We created a large spreadsheet noting details of this audit. It covered all areas of the platform and wether we recommend updating or not.
Continued education
I knew the next important step was to setup design guidelines and best practices for the team to reference and follow. This included several key topics in how to apply these practices with our design library, as well as improved communication with our engineering team to make sure that features are not only designed for accessibility, but built for accessibility.
These key areas include a detailed description on common accessibility obstacles that come up in design and best practices on how to mitigate them.
Collaboration with Engineering team
Throughout this thorough and timely process, I began speaking with folks in different departments:
- User experience research
- Product design
- Engineering
- QA Engineering
- Diversity, equity, & inclusion
If we were going to get an entire organization of multiple teams bought in for this work, they needed to know about it. Every person that I spoke to was on board, as they knew the importance and value of accessibility.
In partnering heavily with our QA engineering team, we have incorporated automated accessibility testing. This testing creates reports on how accessible our platform is. By looking at high traffic pages and flows, we can prioritize issues and assign them to the appropriate team that handles that area of Salesloft.
For additional support, I am partnering with each team's assigned designer and making sure they have the resources they need to address the accessibility issues and communicate solutions to their team.
Next steps
Over the past few years we have accomplished a lot for improving accessibility:
- Accessibility research
- Platform auditing
- Tackling high priority from items from the audit
- Design and engineering guidelines
- A complete accessible design system
- Automated accessibility testing
This effort has been made by many dedicated colleagues here at Salesloft, and I am happy to be a part of it.
Now that we have a specific report on items that need fixed, we are now forming an easy way to tell teams:
- These are the problems
- Here is why they are inaccessible
- Here are suggestions and best practices to fix them
- Redesign, rebuild, and re-test
So as the process continues, we share our efforts with leadership as well as our customers, letting them know how important it is that all can use and access our platform.