Digital accessibility is a competitive advantage

6 min. read
Black and white image of a woman with long hair, standing in front of the word "DELIVERED" repeated in a looping design.
Podcast

Rebecca Pakin, Head of Product Marketing at AccessiWay.

Rebecca studied literature in Italy, then moved to Tel Aviv and spent nine years in its tech scene. She started as a localization writer at Wix, went on to lead the team and moved into product marketing, then worked as a growth product marketer on monday.com's monetization team before relocating to Italy and joining AccessiWay.

Today she is head of product marketing at AccessiWay, a European digital accessibility company based in Torino, with in-house accessibility experts in Torino, Paris and Hamburg. AccessiWay recently launched its own accessibility platform, moving from a consulting business to a SaaS company.

We got into what digital accessibility actually covers, why accessibility should come first when it clashes with visual ambition, what AI has broken along the way, and why accessibility has more in common with building for mobile than with a one-off compliance fix.

Key takeaways#

What is digital accessibility?#

Digital accessibility means building digital products that actually make sense, so they can be used and navigated by all people, including people with disabilities. Rebecca is honest about where she started. When she joined AccessiWay a little over a year ago, she thought accessibility meant putting a ramp in front of a building so people in a wheelchair can get in. The scope turned out to be much wider than websites. It covers smartphones, apps, and the screen at the train station that tells you when your train arrives. Once you see it, you notice it everywhere.

Try this: list every digital touchpoint your customers use, including the ones that never get called "the product". Kiosks, emails, PDFs, in-app flows.

How accessible is the web in 2026?#

Barely. Rebecca puts it at around 95% of the million most visited homepages worldwide that are not really accessible, a number she calls horrible for 2026. That gap is the reason AccessiWay exists. And the problem reaches beyond the homepage, into every touchpoint a company runs.

Try this: run your own homepage through a proper accessibility review this quarter. Assume you're in the 95% until someone qualified proves otherwise.

Who should win when design and accessibility disagree?#

Accessibility, according to Rebecca. The politically correct answer is that you always find a compromise. Her real answer is that accessibility comes first, and that this rarely costs the design anything. You can still do the ambitious things you want to do. You design them so everyone can get in. A designer wants their work used by everyone anyway, and she has never seen a design team unhappy about having to think of accessibility first. If anything, they enjoy the puzzle of finding a solution that works for all.

Try this: move the accessibility check to the start of your next design sprint instead of the QA phase. It's cheaper there, and the team gets to solve it creatively.

What is the most common accessibility failure?#

User flows that don't make sense. Rebecca's rule of thumb: if a website makes you upset, it's probably inaccessible. Her go-to example is setting up a password. You do what you were asked, you still can't log in, and the page never tells you what went wrong. That's frustrating for anyone. For a person with a disability it can be a wall. Her own recent one was offline: at the airport, wearing headphones, a gate change was announced over the speakers and never shown on the board. She nearly missed her flight.

Try this: pick your three most important flows (sign-up, login, checkout) and check that every error message says exactly what's wrong and how to fix it.

Has AI made accessibility better or worse?#

Neither, exactly. In Rebecca's words, it has created different kinds of broken experiences, in two ways. First, tools like Lovable let anyone build a web app in hours, and most of those apps are not accessible, because the people building them don't have the knowledge yet and the tools don't support fully accessible output. Second, the internet is full of AI scanners. Customers run their site through one, fix the list, and think they're done. Most of these scanners miss the critical errors, flag things as critical that aren't, and many are marketing tools built to sell you the fix. She hasn't yet seen an AI-powered scanner that actually makes a touchpoint accessible.

Try this: treat an automated scan as step zero. Get human experts, ideally including people with disabilities, to test the flows that matter.

Is accessibility a one-time fix?#

It's ongoing. This is the biggest misconception Rebecca sees in new customers: they arrive thinking you do it once and it's fixed forever. She compares it to building for mobile. It's something you take with you into everything you build from then on, because every new page, feature and campaign either works for people with disabilities or it doesn't.

Try this: add accessibility to your definition of done, next to "works on mobile". If it's not in the checklist, it will drift.

What is the business case for digital accessibility?#

A touchpoint that works for people with disabilities works well for everyone. That's how Rebecca answers the second big misconception, that accessibility is an annoying compliance task with no provable return. Accessible sites open the door to more visitors, and the experience is simply more pleasant for all of them. Customers who have been with AccessiWay for a few years can see in their own touchpoints that it's good for business. In the best cases, the return shows up as soon as accessibility goes into the design.

Try this: when you pitch accessibility internally, lead with the customer experience and the size of the audience, then mention the regulation.

How do you build accessibility into company culture?#

Live the mission in the small things. At AccessiWay, employees with disabilities work in-house and a chief vision officer leads the way. Every piece of sales collateral, every brochure and every small website change is made accessible, even a brochure made for one customer that maybe no person with a disability will ever read. The office has braille tags at the entrance of every room. There's an elevator that has probably been used once. It was there that one time, and that's the point. Customers who stick with it start doing the same inside their own organisations, with workshops on accessible-by-design products and volunteering days: playing volleyball with blind people, or eating dinner in a completely dark restaurant.

Try this: make one internal document or template fully accessible this month, even if you doubt anyone needs it. It sets the standard faster than a policy does.

What does a product marketer actually do?#

Rebecca describes the role as a bridge between what the company builds and the end customer. Some people think she does marketing, others think she builds products, and the truth is a mix of both. Her job is to make sure customers' pains, needs and desires are heard, and that what AccessiWay creates fits them and fits the market. She sees the sales team as the second beneficiary, because she connects them to what customers find painful and how the product makes their working life better.

Try this: ask your product marketer which customer pain your last release solved. If the answer is vague, the bridge isn't carrying traffic yet.

How do you rebrand in a category where every brand looks the same?#

Start from scratch and give yourself permission to be cool. AccessiWay came to Your Majesty on a recommendation, wanting to redo everything: website, branding, messaging, logo. The company had grown from a startup into an established business and wanted to change how digital accessibility companies present themselves. The brief was to erase everything and build a brand people would want to copy. Rebecca admits she was scared, because every accessibility brand looks pretty much the same, and the deadline was tight, Q2 2026. The launch took place at a big event in the new Torino office, painted in the new colours (pink walls included), with snacks shaped like the edible logo and merch people actually wear outside the house.

Try this: line up your competitors' homepages side by side. If you can swap the logos without anyone noticing, your brand has the same problem AccessiWay's did.

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