Accessibility Is Everyone's Job

The first brief came from inside FINRA. Its product teams wanted to build accessibly, but WCAG arrived as dozens of technical criteria, usually late and usually on a designer's desk. The second came from FINRA's novice-investor initiative, which had found that young people were making money decisions without understanding their own tolerance for risk.

Both were failing people in the same way. Accessibility guidance assumed every project started perfectly, with a designer in charge. Risk tools assumed every investor was already confident, then labelled the ones who weren't. Each asked people to begin somewhere they weren't. So we built both deliverables on one idea: meet people where they are, whatever their role, their project's stage or their comfort with risk.

We split into an Accessibility team and a Risk team, each focused on its own deliverable. Above them sat four leads whose roles spanned both tracks: project, research, visual and experience design. As experience design lead I owned how each deliverable would feel to the people using it, which meant one set of decisions about tone, structure and interaction ran through everything.

The Accessibility team interviewed twelve designers, engineers and product people, ran a concept survey and card-sorted what a guide should contain. The Risk team surveyed 109 young investors, held moderated interviews and ran a sensory cue workshop. More than 2,500 data points went through the Lextant Ideal Experience framework, so every insight was tied to a feeling we wanted people to have, like "I am confident."

The Guide: Accessibility Arrives Late

One survey question told the story. Teams paid most attention to accessibility in high-fidelity design and testing, much less in early design, and least of all in the first conversations with stakeholders, exactly when it costs the least. A guide that only worked if you started right would miss most real projects.

When Teams Consider Accessibility

The Risk Tool: Willing, but Unsure

Young investors weren't reckless. Most wanted to invest, but they didn't trust what they knew, leaned on family and social feeds for advice, and found financial language built to exclude them. Existing risk quizzes made it worse by sorting people into labels that sounded like verdicts.

The Guide: Every Role, Every Stage

Accessibility is a team outcome, so the guide is written for the team. Every guideline breaks down into what management, design, development and QA each contribute, so a developer never has to translate a designer's checklist and a PM can see what to plan for.

The second idea came straight from the survey. Instead of one ideal path that only works from day one, the guide has an entry point for every stage: plan, design, develop, launch and verify. Each tells a team what's still possible and what to do first. Starting late still means starting. Pick a role and a stage below.

The Guide Explorer

The Risk Tool: Characters, Not Judgments

The same principle applied to investors: describe where someone is without ranking them. The early archetypes either sounded like a finance textbook or passed judgment, with the most adventurous profile called The Gambler. I ran a sensory cue workshop where people reacted to digital and physical artifacts for each level of risk, and we listened to the words they used. Through rounds of testing, five characters emerged, each clearly different and none of them wrong. Turn the dial to meet them.

The Character Dial

We ran nine weeks from kickoff to the final readout. Each team had its own rhythm, and the leads met across them every week so research, structure and visual language stayed shared. The Accessibility team split again, into a content group owning the guidelines and a design group owning the UI kit.

The Guide: From WCAG to Plain Language

We sorted WCAG 2.1 by its four POUR principles (Perceivable, Operable, Understandable, Robust), kept the criteria that matter for FINRA and finance, and wrote each one to answer the same three questions: what is it, why does it matter, and how does it affect FINRA. Card sorting turned those 52 criteria into a structure people could find their way through.

The Guide's Structure

The Risk Tool: Questions as Stories

The quiz got the same care in its words. Every question was written twice: once as a plain statement to agree or disagree with, and once as a short story with real choices. Testing kept the stories, which read as a moment from life rather than a finance exam.

One Question, Two Ways

We usability-tested both deliverables with the people they were built for, and every finding went straight into the next version.

Accessibility GuideWe heard We changed

Risk ToolWe heard We changed

“Principle” and “Getting Started” confused peoplePlainer names, with a short definition beside every key term

People tried to spin the landing wheelThe gauge became part of the experience, not decoration

Learning and testing tools blurred togetherResources separated from guidelines; interactive tools first

The landing page read like a brochureRewritten as a story that leads into the quiz

The contrast checker was hard to findOne click from the homepage and every colour guideline

Types sat on separate pagesAll five shown side by side, as testers asked

Alongside the guide we delivered a training deck, Building Accessibility into Your Workflow, so teams could learn the approach together: why accessibility is a mindset rather than a requirement, then what to do while planning, designing, developing and verifying a product. We presented both deliverables to FINRA's digital leadership at the final readout.

FINRA adopted the accessibility guide internally and now uses it across all of its products, so accessibility is something every role owns and every project can pick up, wherever it is. The archetypes reached further than the tool they were made for: FINRA's digital leadership saw them as a new way to describe investors without judgment.