The one person who knows WCAG
Most organizations have one. The person everyone emails when an accessibility complaint comes in. The one who ran the audit, wrote the policy, probably named half the issues in the last external report. They're knowledgeable, overextended, and quietly dreading the next redesign.
This model doesn't work — not because that person isn't capable, but because no single person can review every content update, flag every design decision, and push back on every sprint without becoming a full-time bottleneck.
Accessibility embedded in the way a team works is fundamentally different from accessibility assigned to a person. One scales. The other doesn't.
Why role-specific training matters
The most common accessibility training approach is a single session covering the basics of WCAG for everyone at once. The result is usually surface-level awareness that doesn't change day-to-day behavior, because a developer building a custom dropdown and a content editor writing image captions need completely different knowledge to actually do their jobs more accessibly.
Role-specific training closes that gap. It focuses each person on the decisions they make regularly and gives them practical tools they can apply immediately.
What each role actually needs to know
Developers and front-end engineers
Developers benefit most from hands-on technical training. The goal is to make accessible patterns the default choice, not an extra step.
Focus areas:
The most effective format is code-review-style sessions using the team's own codebase — not hypothetical examples. Reviewing a recent component together is worth more than three hours of slides.
Content editors and copywriters
Content teams shape a huge portion of what users actually experience. Link text, image descriptions, heading structure, plain language, and page titles are all content decisions with direct accessibility implications.
Focus areas:
A 90-minute hands-on session using actual content from your site covers this well. Add a one-page reference guide they can keep at their desk and you'll see lasting behavior change.
UX designers and visual designers
Designers make decisions early in the process that either create accessibility debt or prevent it. Catching issues at the wireframe stage costs nothing. Catching them after development is complete costs real time.
Focus areas:
outline: none)Designers respond well to critique-style workshops where they review previous design decisions and identify what they'd change. It builds pattern recognition faster than abstract instruction.
Project managers and product owners
PMs and product owners rarely need deep technical knowledge. What they need is enough understanding to plan for accessibility work appropriately and to recognize when it's being deprioritized.
Focus areas:
A two-hour session framed around project risk and timeline is effective. Frame accessibility as a planning and quality issue, not an ethics lecture, and you'll get better uptake.
Building a baseline awareness program
Before role-specific training, a short organization-wide baseline creates a shared vocabulary. It doesn't need to be long.
A baseline session covers:
Keep it under two hours. Record it for future onboarding. Pair it with a simple internal reference page so people have somewhere to look things up after the session ends.
Sustaining accessibility knowledge over time
One-time training builds awareness. Sustained practice builds fluency. The organizations that do this well treat accessibility as a recurring part of the team's work, not a training event.
Practical ways to sustain it:
The goal isn't perfection in every release. It's a team where more people catch more issues earlier, more often.
When to bring in a specialist
Shared ownership doesn't mean specialists aren't needed. It means the specialist's time is spent on higher-value work: complex audits, assistive technology testing, training facilitation, policy development, and external conformance reviews.
A cross-functional team handles the day-to-day. A specialist handles the deep, complex, and strategic. Both are necessary. Neither can substitute for the other.
If you want to build an accessibility training program for your team that actually sticks, get in touch and we can design something tailored to your roles, your content, and your timeline.