Before COVID, accessibility in enterprise software was important but often treated as a compliance checkbox. You'd build the feature, then add the ARIA labels. You'd run an audit before launch, fix the critical issues, and ship. Since March, the conversation has shifted. When your entire organisation operates through digital interfaces, accessibility isn't a nice-to-have for the subset of users who need it. It's the foundation for whether anyone can do their job.
What You Need to Know
- Remote work made digital accessibility an operational requirement, not just a compliance concern
- Temporary and situational disabilities increased during lockdown (RSI, eye strain, anxiety affecting focus)
- Video conferencing exposed gaps in audio accessibility, captioning, and bandwidth equity
- Organisations that treated accessibility as foundational adapted faster than those that treated it as an add-on
The Shift
Here's what changed. Before March, an employee with a visual impairment might interact with three or four digital systems daily. Email, a time tracking tool, maybe a project management app. The rest of their work happened through human interaction, physical documents, in-person meetings.
After March, that same employee interacts with digital systems for nearly everything. Every meeting is a video call. Every document is on a screen. Every collaboration happens through software. The surface area of digital accessibility tripled overnight.
24%
of NZ adults live with some form of disability
Source: Stats NZ, Disability Survey, 2013
That 24% figure is from 2013 and likely understates the current reality. It also only counts permanent disabilities. It doesn't include the developer with lockdown-induced RSI from a bad home desk setup, the manager with eye strain from eight hours of video calls, or the team member whose anxiety makes it harder to process dense UI under stress. Situational and temporary impairments are everywhere right now.
What Remote Work Exposed
Video Conferencing Gaps
Zoom, Teams, and Google Meet became the primary communication channel for most organisations overnight. For Deaf and hard-of-hearing employees, this was a mixed experience. Auto-captioning exists but it's unreliable, especially with New Zealand accents and te reo Māori terms. Background noise in home environments degrades audio quality further.
One of our clients has a team member who is hard of hearing. In the office, they'd learned to lip-read in meetings and their colleagues had naturally adapted, facing them when speaking, reducing background noise. On video calls, the small camera frames, inconsistent lighting, and audio compression made lip-reading much harder. The workaround was meeting notes posted in a shared document within an hour of every meeting. Functional, but a workaround that shouldn't be necessary.
Bandwidth Inequality
This one surprised us. When everyone moved home, the assumption was that everyone had adequate internet. They didn't. Some team members in rural or lower-income areas had connections that couldn't support video calls reliably. This created a participation gap. You can't contribute equally in a meeting you keep dropping out of.
Accessibility isn't just about the interface. COVID showed us that infrastructure inequality is an accessibility issue.
Rainui Teihotua
Chief Creative Officer
Screen Fatigue and Cognitive Load
Every interface decision matters more when people are staring at screens for eight or more hours. Font sizes that were acceptable for occasional use become painful for all-day use. Colour contrast that was borderline becomes genuinely unreadable at hour six. Complex navigation that was tolerable for a ten-minute task becomes exhausting when you live inside the application.
What Good Looks Like
The organisations handling this well share a few characteristics.
Accessibility is a design constraint, not an afterthought. They start with accessible patterns and build features on top. They don't add accessibility later. This approach is faster overall because retrofitting accessibility is consistently more expensive than building it in.
They test with real users. Automated accessibility tools catch about 30% of issues. The rest require human testing. Organisations that include people with disabilities in their testing process ship better products. Not just more accessible products. Better products. Because the constraints that accessibility imposes, clear hierarchy, simple navigation, readable text, improve the experience for everyone.
They consider the full range of abilities. Not just permanent disabilities. Situational impairments like screen fatigue, temporary impairments like RSI, and environmental factors like poor lighting or noisy home offices. Designing for the full range of human circumstances produces more resilient interfaces.
57%
of accessibility issues are detectable by automated testing tools alone
Source: WebAIM Million Report, 2020
Practical Steps
For enterprise teams wondering where to start:
Audit your most-used interfaces. Not everything. The three or four applications your team uses daily. Run an automated scan (WAVE, axe, Lighthouse) and manually test keyboard navigation. Fix the critical issues first.
Establish accessible defaults in your design system. Minimum font sizes, contrast ratios, focus states, and keyboard navigation built into every component. We wrote about design systems recently, and accessibility is one of the strongest arguments for investing in one.
Caption everything. Recorded meetings, training videos, async presentations. Auto-captions are a start. Edited captions are better. It takes time. It includes people who would otherwise be excluded.
Ask your team. The simplest and most overlooked step. Ask your team what's making their digital work harder. You'll hear about accessibility barriers you didn't know existed, because the people experiencing them have been quietly working around them.
Remote work isn't temporary for most organisations. The digital-first world we've built in the last six months is the world we're keeping. Making sure everyone can participate fully in that world isn't optional. It's foundational.