Accessibility-First Engineering: Our Path to WCAG Compliance

When we set out to bring the SingleDoor payments platform into full WCAG compliance, the scope felt impossible. A million daily users, a surface area covering bill pay, P2P with Zelle, and card payments, and an audit list longer than our sprint board.

Start with an audit you can trust

We kicked off with an automated audit, then paired every flagged component with a manual screen-reader pass. Automated tools catch about 30% of real issues. The other 70% only show up when a human walks through the flows the way an assistive-tech user actually would.

Make accessibility a definition of done

The only change that stuck was making it a gate rather than a backlog item. Every story’s definition of done now includes keyboard coverage, focus order, contrast, and a screen-reader smoke test. It slowed the first few sprints and then became muscle memory.

Why it made the product better for everyone

• Focus management forced us to fix broken navigation patterns.
• Contrast work improved readability in bright daylight — a real-world usability win, not a checkbox.
• Semantic landmarks made the app easier for everyone to scan quickly.

Compliance isn’t a project you finish. It’s a property you maintain. The product is measurably better for it — and the audit debt stopped compounding.