The Enterprise Guide to Scaling Digital Accessibility

For enterprise teams, digital accessibility rarely announces itself as a problem.

It shows up quietly: a missing form label, a button that can’t be reached by keyboard, a modal that traps focus for assistive technology. On a single page, these issues are easy to overlook. But across large enterprise ecosystems, they add up fast — impacting user experiences and exposing organizations to the risk of litigation.

That exposure is no longer hypothetical. The number of accessibility lawsuits is on the rise, with a sharp uptick in the number of claims filed in state courts and new global regulations expanding the scope of enforcement. At the same time, inaccessible experiences undermine SEO, limit AI-driven discovery, and erode customer trust.

What once felt like a compliance edge case is now a real risk for enterprise teams.

Most organizations don’t struggle with awareness or intent. They struggle with scale. Accessibility programs that rely solely on manual processes or point-in-time audits alone break down under constant change and distributed teams.

This guide focuses on what actually holds up at enterprise scale: the structures, decisions, and operating models that allow accessibility to survive growth, releases, and organizational complexity.

Breaking Down the Scalable Accessibility Model

Before going any further, it helps to understand the traits that make up successful enterprise accessibility programs. The ones that succeed — and hold up over time — tend to share five characteristics:

1. Ongoing visibility into accessibility health across properties

2. Risk-based prioritization focused on critical user journeys

3. Remediation that reduces repeat work, not just closes tickets

4. Continuous protection between releases

5. Clear ownership and governance that survives organizational change

You don’t need to perfect all five at once. But when one is missing, accessibility efforts tend to stall — or quietly regress. The rest of this guide unpacks why these elements matter and how they show up in practice.

Why Accessibility Matters for Enterprises

The cost of inaccessibility is rising on multiple fronts:

• From a legal perspective, risk continues to climb. Web accessibility lawsuits have increased steadily year over year, with total claims up 43% since 2020. New regulations, including the launch of the European Accessibility Act (EAA) in June 2025, raise expectations (and legal risk) even further.

• From a growth perspective, inaccessible experiences shut out a massive audience. One in six people globally live with a disability. Along with friends and family, people with disabilities control over $18.3 trillion in disposable income(opens in a new tab). When your digital experiences aren’t accessible, that opportunity is lost.

• From an SEO and AEO perspective, accessibility is foundational. Structured, semantic content is easier for search engines — and AI-driven search assistants — to understand. Even Google’s Search Essentials(opens in a new tab) read like a series of accessibility best practices. As SEO and AEO increasingly drive discoverability, accessible sites are simply more visible.

• And from a brand perspective, accessibility reinforces trust. Inclusive digital experiences support public commitments to equity and inclusion, while inaccessible ones quietly erode credibility. According to Unilever, 33% of global consumers buy from brands they believe are doing social or environmental good(opens in a new tab).

A series of four icons that read: legal, growth, SEO and AEO, and Brand

What Accessibility Actually Means at Enterprise Scale

Digital accessibility means building digital experiences that people with disabilities can fully perceive, navigate, and use — often with assistive technologies like screen readers or voice control.

For enterprise organizations, accessibility extends far beyond a single website. It spans marketing sites, ecommerce platforms, mobile apps, customer portals, PDFs, multimedia content, and internal tools. In practice, accessibility touches nearly every system that supports revenue, operations, and brand reputation.

Most accessibility requirements are defined by the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines(opens in a new tab) (WCAG), a set of standards referenced by nearly all accessibility laws. WCAG focuses on making digital content perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust — principles that tend to improve usability for all users, not just those with disabilities.

The challenge for enterprises isn’t understanding WCAG. It’s maintaining accessibility as everything changes.

For a quick overview of the best practices and base requirements, check out AudioEye’s free learning course: Web Accessibility 101.

Why Accessibility Breaks Down at Scale

For most enterprises, the challenge isn’t buy-in. It’s sustainability.

Large organizations are in constant motion. Design systems evolve. Content updates daily. New components ship on different schedules, owned by teams that rarely work in lockstep. Even when accessibility issues are fixed in source code, they’re often reintroduced the moment something changes.

This is where many accessibility programs begin to falter. Design, product, and engineering teams operate in silos. Legacy systems coexist with modern frameworks. One-time audits identify issues, but without ongoing visibility, fixes don’t hold. Over time, regressions creep in and confidence fades.

Common enterprise challenges include:

Sustainable enterprise accessibility requires something more durable: approaches designed to scale with the organization, protect experiences continuously, and integrate naturally into complex, evolving digital ecosystems.

Accessibility in a Complex Regulatory Environment

Enterprise organizations rarely operate under a single accessibility law. Most serve global audiences, which means being accountable to multiple regulations at once.

In the United States, the Department of Justice has consistently interpreted the Americans with Disabilities Act(opens in a new tab) (ADA) to apply to digital properties as well as physical locations. Section 508 establishes accessibility requirements for federal agencies and organizations that do business with them. State-level laws like California’s Unruh Act and New York’s Human Rights Law also establish requirements for websites and other digital properties.

In Europe, the European Accessibility Act introduces broad digital accessibility requirements that apply to any organization that offers digital products or services to customers in the European Union, regardless of where the business is headquartered. In Canada, Ontario’s Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA) set rules for accessibility in multiple areas, including digital accessibility, customer service, and employment.

Despite different jurisdictions, nearly all of these laws point back to the same technical benchmark: WCAG 2.1 or 2.2.

Learn the accessibility laws and standards to know with AudioEye’s free learning course: Digital Compliance and Accessibility →

A series of five icons representing some of the challenges that can make it hard for enterprise teams to scale accessibility

Building an Enterprise Accessibility Program That Scales

Enterprise accessibility programs don’t fail because teams skip steps. They fail because those steps don’t survive contact with reality.

Most organizations start the right way: an audit, a backlog of issues, a burst of progress. But without a structure that can absorb constant change, that progress is fragile.

Scalable programs are built differently.

They start with broad assessment, combining automated testing for coverage with expert testing for complex workflows and edge cases. Automation identifies patterns. Experts provide context.

They prioritize risk over volume, focusing first on high-impact pages and user flows — checkout, account creation, core navigation — then standardizing fixes through shared components and templates.

And they treat compliance as continuous, not one-and-done. Accessibility is monitored in real time, regressions are flagged as they appear, and governance ensures accountability doesn’t disappear between releases.

At enterprise scale, this typically includes:

• Clear ownership and executive sponsorship

• Shared standards across design, engineering, and content

• Governance that spans teams, brands, and regions

• Ongoing reporting tied to real business and legal risk

The Tooling That Makes Scale Possible

Scalable programs rely on a deliberate mix of tools and expertise, each addressing a different source of risk.

Automated monitoring and fixes provide broad, continuous coverage across large, dynamic sites. Automation surfaces patterns, flags regressions early, and resolves many common issues immediately — reducing exposure while teams focus on more complex work.

That coverage is paired with expert testing of key pages, templates, and workflows. Certified experts and people with disabilities evaluate experiences automation can’t reliably assess, identifying high-risk barriers and informing what to fix first.

For issues that require code changes, custom fixes are applied consistently across shared components. Over time, this supports the development of an accessible component library that prevents the same problems from reappearing.

Scalable programs also invest in developer tools, allowing teams to identify issues earlier — when they’re faster and less costly to fix.

Finally, lasting progress depends on upskilling teams. Role-based training, clear guidance, and optional tooling help organizations take on more accessibility work in-house, without losing consistency or oversight.

Why Hybrid Approaches Work Best at Enterprise Scale

At scale, no single approach is enough.

• Automated testing tools are essential for breadth. They quickly detect common WCAG issues and monitor large, dynamic sites — but they can’t evaluate usability, intent, or real-world interactions.

• Manual testing delivers depth. Human experts — including people with disabilities — can assess complex workflows and edge cases, but manual testing alone doesn’t scale.

• Fix-at-source–only approaches are necessary but brittle. They place heavy, ongoing demands on internal teams, struggle with regressions, and require constant coordination across silos.

Hybrid platforms combine these approaches. Automation handles scale. Human experts cover what machines can’t. Platform-level remediation reduces repeated source-level fixes, protecting experiences as content and design changes.

For enterprise teams, this means fewer regressions, lower risk, and accessibility that keeps pace with development.

How to Maintain Accessibility Over Time

Maintaining accessibility across large organizations requires discipline and visibility. Effective enterprise programs focus on:

• Continuous monitoring and reporting across all digital properties

• Accessibility debt management, prioritized by risk

• Tracking and validating fixes over time

• Ongoing training for product, design, and engineering teams

When evaluating accessibility vendors, enterprises should look beyond audits and ask:

• How does this solution integrate into existing workflows?

• How does it protect us between releases?

• How does it scale across teams and properties

• How does it reduce — not increase — change management burden?

Looking Ahead: Future Trends in Enterprise Accessibility

Several trends are reshaping accessibility for large organizations:

• AI-generated and personalized content, which increases the pace of change

• Stronger regulatory enforcement, particularly around the EAA and future WCAG updates

• Greater reliance on AI-driven search and assistants, where accessible structure directly affects visibility

Enterprises that build accessibility into their platforms and processes today will be better positioned to adapt as expectations rise.

Accessibility That Holds Up

Enterprise accessibility isn’t about chasing checklists. It’s about building digital systems that hold up under organizational, technical, and legal pressure.

That requires solutions designed for scale — ones that combine automation and human expertise, protect experiences continuously, and integrate cleanly into complex, constantly changing environments.

AudioEye helps enterprises move from reactive compliance to sustainable accessibility. Our platform brings together automated monitoring, expert testing, platform-level remediation, and governance support — so accessibility scales with your business instead of slowing it down.

Ready to build accessibility that lasts?

Request a free AudioEye demo and see how scalable accessibility really works.