Making accessibility routine instead of an expensive yearly audit

E.ON Next needed its app to meet WCAG 2.1 AA, the accessibility standard, as a core product requirement rather than a compliance afterthought.

• The default approach, commissioning full-journey audits over and over, was slow, expensive, and found issues after they were built.
• A third-party accessibility toolbar was on the table: cheap, visible, and a way of signalling 'accessibility handled' without fixing the underlying issues.

• Onboarded a specialist accessibility team and defined the operating model, including how the work was priced.
• Moved testing down to component level, so issues were caught once, early, instead of rediscovered in every journey that used the component.
• Held the line against the toolbar shortcut, and steered the organisation toward accessibility built into how it designs and ships: automated and manual checks in the build pipeline, with remediation in the code.