American Express Global Commercial Services: Building A Digital Accessibility Program

Retrospective: Years 0-2

  • Project Length: 2 years

  • Scope: Remediation and Integration

  • Role: Lead

  • Team: 2 (Product Designer Digital Accessibility Lead and Project Manager)

  • 9 Digital Products

    • 300+  Cross-functional Stakeholders

Let’s Shift left

The Problem: Global Commercial Services became part of the National Bank, and thus became subject to U.S. regulations. The company has an internal federated model for digital accessibility. 


How might we create a digital accessibility program to support our teams in shipping accessible products that adhere to WCAG and Section 508 of the U.S. Rehabilitation Act?

Remediate Legacy Products

  • Audit 9 Digital Products (via vendor due to lack of internal resources)

  • 13,000+ accessibility gaps

  • Partner with Product Owners, Designs, and Developers to fix existing gaps

    • Resourcing, sizing, and prioritization based on gap severity

    • Determine any products or sub-experiences with upcoming sunsets

Integrate Accessibility into The Delivery Lifecycle

  • Educate on the importance of digital a11y: Every cross-functional discipline has a role to play.

  • Gain cross-functional Leadership and Compliance buy-in

  • Develop an a11y training plan for cross-functional teams

  • Collaborate to create an integrated process and collect feedback

  • Iterate and implement

A11y Supports Our Enterprise Goals: Accessibility (a11y) is more than a compliance objective; it’s about providing a good user experience for everyone: Inclusive Design; Diversity Equity and Inclusion Promises; Client Contracts; Internal Policies and External Laws

Develop Resources to Empower Our Teams

From Templates for Product Requirements to Tech Checklists and beyond, there were many asset gaps that we needed to fill.

Addressing Product Design A11y Annotations in particular was a challenging opportunity.

  • Constraint: Enterprise Security is strict and limits access to tools

  • Tool: Teams received access to Figma in the summer of 2023 but without the use of plugins due to security concerns

  • Annotation Solution: Through collaboration with other Organizations, we co-created an internal a11y component library in Figma—in November of 2024 this library was adopted by the Enterprise Design System for all design teams to leverage

    • This allows web and mobile designers to add this kit to their asset library and easily include annotations with their wireframes for dev handoff

An annotation example from a Mobile Product Designer: Mobile Timeline

Bring in Users’ Voices

  • A critical pillar of a mature a11y program involves community partnerships to elevate users’ voices

  • In partnership with Design Ops and Research organized in-person user research sessions at the American Council of the Blind Annual Conference and Convention—an unprecedented opportunity for the Enterprise,

  • We interviewed 20 participants in 1:1 sessions, as well as focus groups to gain rich qualitative insights about digital experiences for the blind and low vision community

  • Later, we were able to our learnings with the Enterprise via the company’s annual Design Conference to help all of our teams create accessible experiences

A group of three women in American Express shirts and one man sit across a table from a man living with low vision who is participating in a user interview
A woman a brown blazer stands at a podium in front of several audience members. She is looking at a projector screen witch contains a quote from a participant

Build Out A Team

  • To move up in maturity we needed to expand our team and bring audits in-house

  • Helping Leadership understand where the team is at and where the team is going is crucial

  • After mapping out exact costs and role responsibilities, as well as allocating the proper budget for annual planning, we were able to hire a new teammate to focus on performing internal audits and assist our Dev and QA teams with identifying and fixing a11y gaps during and after build

What I Learned

  • Gaining Executive and Compliance trust and buy-in early is critical for making change

    • Change can feel slow in an Enterprise but being prepared and patient pays off

  • Collaboration between organizations and teams is key to creating impactful outputs

  • Gather feedback early and often to keep improving

  • Be flexible and accessible. Communicating with and Training dozens of designers takes time and adding a process change can create hesitation. Show up for the team and be available for open office hours to help answer questions.

  • Dive in. It can be difficult to know where to start when you’re dealing with a blank slate. Zoom out and map out a objectives first, then zoom in and focus on tactical strategy will increase velocity