Yes, your site can (and should) be accessible: Lessons learned building FT.com
summary
FT.com discovers accessibility doesn’t happen by accident: initial automated scans find about 200 errors, manual audit by the Digital Accessibility Center produces a 200‑page report, and remediation across ~30 apps yields accreditation. The team integrates Polly into CI with a CI threshold to avoid breaking work while surfacing issues, fixes contrast, missing alt text and form labels, hides inaccessible ads with tabindex="-1" and uses aria-hidden to remove duplicate blocks, and tests keyboard‑only to validate real usability for 26% of users.
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chapters (11)
- 0:00Introduction to accessibility
- 2:12Realizing accessibility matters
- 8:17Starting small with Pa11y
- 14:42Training teams before breaking builds
- 20:05Fixing common accessibility issues
- 27:14Beyond automated tools
- 33:21Testing with real users
- 34:47Keyboard-only testing
- 38:02Avoid burnout as champion
- 40:30Diversity improves products
- 41:36Actionable next steps
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