Accessibility at Scale with Craig Abbott (TetraLogical) | WCAG, Screen Readers, Design Systems

Your product passes every automated accessibility check. Does that mean anyone can actually use it?

Craig Abbott is a Principal Accessibility Specialist at TetraLogical and the former Head of Accessibility at the UK's Department for Work and Pensions, one of the largest government departments in the country, where he built a dedicated accessibility practice from nothing and open sourced the DWP Accessibility Manual. He has over 15 years in user centred design, previously working as a designer and design manager, and has led accessibility work across the public sector and at Elastic.

In this episode we get into what "sustainable accessibility" actually means, why culture is harder to change than capability, and how to stop accessibility from walking out the door when the one passionate person leaves. Craig breaks down his three C's framework (compliance, culture, capability), the screen reader testing stack he actually recommends, and what you can realistically automate in a CI pipeline with Playwright, Cucumber and Guidepup.

We also get into the uncomfortable stuff. Automated tools only catch around 40% of issues. A page can pass WCAG with two pixel text and invisible links. And with 95.8% of the top million websites failing automated checks, the LLMs writing your front end code were trained on all of it. Craig is autistic and ADHD, and he closes on cognitive accessibility, the WCAG AAA gap, and why designing for neurodivergent users is still mostly ignored.

Key Topics:

- What sustainable accessibility means and why third party audits alone don't get you there

- Building an accessibility practice from scratch inside a 100,000 person organisation

- The three C's: compliance, culture and capability, and why culture is the hardest

- Embedding accessibility so it survives when the champion leaves

- JAWS vs NVDA vs VoiceOver vs TalkBack, and why the "worse" reader is the better test

- Running screen readers in VMs and BrowserStack without expensive licences

- Accessibility acceptance tests in CI with Playwright, Cucumber and Guidepup

- Why compliant does not mean usable, with two pixel fonts and invisible links as proof

- Shifting accessibility left into design and research, not throwing it at developers

- Why you cannot detect screen reader users in your analytics

- The three highest impact things: automated tools, keyboard only, structured content

- Why CSS and design systems aren't opinionated enough

- AI-generated front-end code and the 95.8% problem

- Whether AI browsing replaces screen readers, and why LLM interfaces are inaccessible too

- Designing for neurodivergence, WCAG AAA, and the COGA guidance

CONNECT WITH CRAIG

💼 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/abbott567/

🐦 X: https://x.com/abbott567

🦋 Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/craigabbott.bsky.social

🌐 Website: https://www.craigabbott.co.uk

FOLLOW & SUBSCRIBE

🎙️ Podcast: https://neciudan.dev/senors-at-scale

📬 Newsletter: https://neciudan.dev/subscribe

💼 Dan's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/neciudan

🏢 Show LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/senors-scale/

📸 Show Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/senorsatscale/

📸 Dan's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/neciudev

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

TetraLogical: https://tetralogical.com

WebAIM Million report: https://webaim.org/projects/million/

W3C Cognitive Accessibility (COGA): https://www.w3.org/WAI/cognitive/

Guidepup: https://www.guidepup.dev/

axe-con: https://www.deque.com/axe-con/

#accessibility #a11y #webdevelopment #wcag #frontend #inclusivedesign #softwareengineering #neurodiversity #designsystems #senorsatscale

💬 Has your team ever shipped something fully compliant that users still couldn't use? Tell me about it in the comments.