Work
Three companies, three different ways in: a program designed from scratch, a company-wide product transformation, and quiet embedding in the work itself. Plus one global scale-up in hospitality. Here's what each actually looked like.
Hilton - accessibility at global scale
- What I did
- Led accessibility across Hilton's global digital portfolio: 7,500 sites, 17 languages, a 24-person team. My title was Lead Accessibility Analyst; the scope was the program.
- What changed
- The program's work tied to a $26.5M RevPAR impact.
- What it proves
- Accessibility programs fail at scale in predictable ways - inconsistent standards across brands and languages, remediation debt, no ownership. This is what it looks like when those get solved.
Bottle Rocket - the program built from scratch
- The situation
- In 2018, WCAG 2.1 landed with real cognitive criteria. The measurable side of accessibility - low vision, contrast - already made sense to product teams. The cognitive side didn't have a home anywhere. At Bottle Rocket, accessibility had no owner at all. I became it.
- What I did
- I designed the accessibility program from scratch and rolled it out, including an Accessibility Council.
- What happened
- I left the company some months later, and the program didn't sustain.
- What it taught me
- A practice that lives in one person ends when that person leaves. Every engagement I've taken since starts with the ownership model, not the audit.
Alto - accessibility without the mandate
- What I did
- No program, no announcement. I covertly embedded accessibility in all of my work with the engineering, design, QA, and business teams - nothing overt, everything in the work itself.
- What it proves
- Not every company is ready for a formal practice. Embedding accessibility in the everyday work raises the floor without asking for permission - and it shows in the product whether or not it ever gets a name.
Cariloop - product transformation with accessibility at the core
- The situation
- I was brought in to introduce Product Management as a practice and help transform the company to be product-centric. Cariloop's caregiver-matching platform serves families who include people with disabilities and aging users - accessibility was the product working or not working.
- What I did
- Digital accessibility was a core component of my product-centric SDLC philosophy. I introduced it to the company through a Lunch and Learn, and served as product owner for the caregiver-matching platform - so accessibility decisions happened in the roadmap, not in a remediation queue.
- What changed
- The transformation succeeded, and accessibility became one of the company's pillars.
- What it proves
- Accessibility sticks when it's part of how a company builds product, not a layer audited in afterward.