How Leaders Build Accessibility into Everyday Decisions
One simple question. One huge impact.
Over the last year, I have worked closely with Dr. Nicole L’Etoile. I have mentioned her before, but today I want to talk about her leadership. She’s an exemplary accessibility leader.
Her leadership isn’t defined by signing sweeping corporate policies, publishing lengthy mission statements, or launching massive company-wide initiatives.
It’s defined by the microbehaviors she exhibits every single day.
When you work with her, you notice a distinct, intentional pattern in how she operates:
· She ensures captions are turned on for live meetings, so no one has to suffer the friction of requesting them in front of their peers.
· She addresses peoples’ concerns in advance, anticipating barriers rather than waiting for someone to struggle and complain.
· She knows that auto-captions for recorded videos are rarely good enough, so she takes the time to manually clean up her transcripts to ensure complex terms aren’t butchered by a robot.
· She ensures every single image has alt text, because visual context as a basic requirement rather than a luxury.
· She creates audio descriptions for her videos, even when she knows there aren’t a lot of people currently using them, because she is building an environment ready for inclusion.
These seem like small choices. But to the people she works with, these small choices shape the entire culture they experience.
They signal, louder than any corporate memo ever could, that everyone in the room is valued and welcomed to participate fully.
The Most Powerful Leadership Question
She’s done one simple thing to ensure she can continue to operate like this. Before making decisions that could impact accessibility, she asks herself one question:
“If I don’t do this, who am I excluding?”
This is one of the most powerful questions a leader can ask. It’s powerful because it allows leaders to sense-check their behaviors in a way that feels visceral and immediate.
When organizations talk about accessibility, they usually talk about it in abstract terms. They talk about compliance, legal risk, or hypothetical user demographics. They look at spreadsheets and vendor templates.
But when you ask yourself “Who am I excluding?”, the answer stops being an abstract demographic or a potential lawsuit.
The answer becomes Yusuf in Accounting, who relies on keyboard navigation. It becomes Bonnie on your team, who needs high contrast to read your slide deck. It becomes me, who relies on a screen reader to access the daily update.
By asking this question, Dr. L’Etoile shifts accessibility from a technical requirement to a human reality. She recognizes that exclusion is rarely intentional. It is usually the byproduct of a leader moving too fast to consider the human beings on the other side of the screen.
By pausing to name the exclusion, she interrupts that corporate speed and replaces it with intentionality.
Scaling the Microbehavior
We all want to work for leaders like Dr. L’Etoile. But as we discussed throughout the Accessibility Leadership series, relying on individual champions is not a sustainable business strategy.
If your organization’s accessibility depends on whether a specific manager remembers to turn on the captions, your system is fragile. It means that the moment that inclusive leader takes a vacation or moves to a new department, the culture they built instantly vanishes.
Poof. Just like that.
Building Organizational Capability
A Unified Capability Model takes the high-level goals of an organization and translates them into the daily microbehaviors of its people. It’s the process of taking Dr. L’Etoile’s personal philosophy and embedding it into the structural framework of the business.
When Design, Tech, Culture, and Leadership all operate under a unified model, writing alt text is no longer a favor done by a nice leader. It becomes a hard requirement in the publishing workflow.
Cleaning up video transcripts isn’t going above and beyond. It’s just what quality looks like at your company, written right into the project’s definition of done.
You can’t mandate empathy. But you can mandate the microbehaviors that produce an empathetic culture.
The Bridge Between Champion and System
There’s a tension here. I just said that relying on individual champions is a fragile strategy, yet I’m about to ask you to change your own daily habits.
Both things are true. You don’t need to wait for permission from Corporate to start asking yourself this question, and Corporate shouldn’t rely solely on your individual heroism to stay functional.
The intersection between those two truths is your sphere of influence. You don’t change your daily habits just to be a “nice” volunteer. You change them to create a localized standard operating procedure.
Your individual microbehaviors act as the prototype for your organization’s larger Unified Capability Model.
Remember, systemic change is just individual leadership at scale.
So if you want to contribute to a more inclusive culture, borrow Dr. L’Etoile’s framework. The next time you prepare a slide deck, record a training video, or send out a meeting invite, take a five-second pause. Look at the decisions you are making, look at the tools you are using, and ask yourself the question.
“If I don’t do this, who am I excluding?”
Discussion
Take a look at your own daily routines. What is one microbehavior or small choice you can adopt this week to make your workflow more accessible? Let us know in the comments.
Then, for more thoughts on accessibility leadership, remember to subscribe for future posts.