Make it visible, make it personal, then ask

That was the real challenge, and it was sharper than it sounds. The A11y Playground team told us their outreach was going unanswered. The pattern was not hostility, it was indifference: come let's work together, met with don't need lah. And the standard response to indifference is to explain harder. More briefings, more decks, more acronyms. WCAG 2.2 is precisely the kind of subject that dies in a briefing deck, because to someone who has never watched a person struggle with an inaccessible form, it is a compliance line item with no face on it.

Finding the actual problem

We went looking for what actually moves executives on this, and the research was unusually consistent. The Valuable 500's 2024 work found empathy to be the most cited trait among disability-inclusive executives, and that leaders with personal exposure to accessibility barriers are the ones who drive systemic reform, a finding echoed by the International Association of Accessibility Professionals. Read that carefully and the diagnosis falls out: the blocker was never awareness of the rules. Accessibility simply had no presence in these leaders' daily environment and no human face. Anything that stays abstract and technical stays deprioritised.

That reframed the whole brief. Everyone had been trying to improve the ask. We concluded the ask was fine and the sequence was wrong. We explained it to the client with a deliberately silly analogy: proposing to someone before the first date. The proposal is not the problem. Asking it first is. So instead of sharpening the pitch, we designed the phase that should have existed before any pitch: visibility first, then understanding, and only then the ask.

What we built

Visibility meant putting accessibility into the physical environment of the people who could fix it. We designed posters for agency offices that made the four most common accessibility failures concrete, deliberately ranked from easiest to hardest fix: colour contrast (a minimum ratio of 4.5:1), labelling buttons and links properly, alt text on images, and clear heading structure. The ranking was the point. An executive's first unspoken question is what will this cost me, and leading with the cheapest fix makes the first step feel small instead of existential.

Understanding meant making it personal. Each poster carried a QR code geo-tagged to the specific agency it hung in. Scanning it did not show a government-wide statistic, it showed that agency's own site, its current accessibility status, and how many steps it sat from WCAG 2.2 compliance. Not the public sector's problem. Your site, your gap, counted in steps rather than jargon. The research said personal exposure is what converts executives, so we engineered the exposure instead of waiting for it to happen naturally.

Only after those two phases does A11y Playground make its ask, and by then it is no longer a cold one. The work took 1st place in the GovTech x NAFA Collaboration, judged with the technical stakeholder in the room, which mattered to me more than the placing: it held up in front of the people who own the problem, not just a design jury.

The takeaway

Stakeholder indifference is almost never an information problem, so information almost never fixes it. When someone with authority will not engage, the instinct is to explain again, louder, with a better deck. What actually moves them is changing the sequence: make the problem visible inside their world, make it personal to their responsibility, and only then make the ask. I now run every hard conversation in a project this way, sign-off, budget, scope. If the ask keeps bouncing, stop polishing the ask. Ask what should have come before it.