Chelsey Wiley
GOVERNANCE · RISK REDUCTION
Accessibility as Strategic Advantage
Turning a WCAG AA compliance mandate into a portfolio-level capability — by putting governance in the platform, not the project.
CLIENT
Boston's Pizza
YEAR
2019
ROLE
Experience Producer --> Product Manager
After the 2019 Domino's Pizza ruling triggered a wave of web accessibility lawsuits, Boston's Pizza needed to reach WCAG AA compliance — fast — without producing the kind of accessibility work that decays the moment marketing edits a page. The question wasn't whether to comply. The question was whether the compliance would still be true six months later.
Why compliance projects usually decay
The reason most accessibility work fails over time is structural. A team builds an accessible website. The certification is real. Then a designer adds an inaccessible component six months later. A marketer uploads an image without alt text. A new template ships without keyboard navigation. The certification quietly stops being true, and no one notices until the next audit — or the next lawsuit.
The brief from Boston's was implicitly about delivery. The strategic question I asked was: what would it take for this compliance to still be true in two years, regardless of who edits the site?
The decisive move was on the CMS side:
make non-compliance the harder path.
Putting governance in the platform
I scoped the work to deliver both — WCAG AA compliance at launch, and a governance model that prevented decay over time. The reframe was important: accessibility couldn't be a deliverable, it had to be a property of the platform.
We built a custom accessible design system in Sketch, mapped to component patterns in the WordPress platform. The development team owned ARIA labels, keyboard navigation, and the backend logic that made the patterns reliable. Designers established the color contrast and affordance standards.
I built user roles and content rules into the WordPress admin so the accessibility standards couldn't be broken by routine content management. Alt text was mandatory on image upload. Keyboard-navigation patterns were enforced in the templates rather than the page builder. The site remained compliant because the platform made non-compliance the harder path. External accessibility experts reviewed each milestone. SiteImprove monitored compliance continuously.
What the project unlocked
Boston's Pizza launched WCAG AA compliant and remained compliant through ongoing content operations. The codebase and standards became the baseline for every accessibility project that followed in the firm's pipeline — a one-project investment that compounded into a new firm-wide capability.
The deeper outcome was internal: the design and development teams went from outsourcing accessibility expertise to leading it. Workshops, partnerships with external accessibility experts, and prototyping with assistive-technology users built capability that lasted beyond this one project. Compliance became a discipline the team could carry forward.
WCAG AA
Achieved at launch and held through ongoing content operations
0
Decay post-launch — governance lived in the CMS, not the design
Baseline
For every accessibility project the firm shipped afterward
Closing Note
The strategic move here was treating compliance as platform architecture rather than as a project deliverable. Most accessibility work decays because it's built once and not enforced. By putting the governance in the CMS — by making non-compliance the harder path — the work stayed durable, which is what made it scalable into a firm-wide capability.
The same logic applies to any compliance or governance domain. The durable interventions are the ones that change the platform's defaults, not the ones that ship a one-time fix.