Carey Estes, Accessibility Lead at OneMain Financial, shares how he built a scalable accessibility program grounded in action, automation, and advocacy. From a life-changing experience of temporary blindness to leading DevOps integration and enterprise-wide enablement, Carey explains how accessibility becomes sustainable when embedded into systems and culture. His ultimate aim: accessibility so well integrated it creates “radio silence.”

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Hi, this is Joe Walensky,

and this is another episode of Digital Accessibility: The People Behind the Progress,

and I have the opportunity to

speak with another accessibility colleague.

Today I am visiting with Kari Estes. Hello, Kari, how are you today?

I'm good, how are you?

Well, it's yet another atmospheric

river happening in Bellingham, Washington, where I reside.

Where are you talking to us from?

I'm speaking from very far away in Shaw,

Mississippi.

Allright, well, I

think the only places I've been to are Jackson and Biloxi,

but I'm always interested in

exploring a little bit more.

So I'm in the Mississippi Delta,

so not far from the Great Mississippi River.

Well, it's good to have you

on this program.

I'm really interested to hear about your

background and your work.

So actually, the best place to start is if you could just

tell us a little bit about what you're up to now. Absolutely.

So I'm the accessibility lead at OneMain Financial.

I sit at the intersection of design, engineering, and operations.

I have a background started in design

and UX,

but I always had kind of a knack for writing code and anything technical,

so I ended up gravitating towards

parts of the product work

where the craft kind of meets those real-world constraints and requirements.

Accessibility itself kind of pulled me in because it's one of those few areas where

design quality

and the engineering quality, the code quality,

and human impact all kind of meet in a very measurable way,

in a way where you can see the outcome and you can tell that you're making a positive

difference with people.

So that's what I'm doing these days.

The main part of my role is trying to scale an accessibility program at OneMain,

which involves turning

singular instances like audits into a fully

scalable system.

So that involves automated audits,

getting everyone familiar with what accessibility is and how it works within their

kind of workflow, building developer playbooks,

figuring out Jira workflows,

working with DevOps for CI/CD pipelines to figure out the best place to inject some of

those accessibility QHX there,

aligning with the design system,

making sure that what we're creating

from the component level is accessible,

and then enabling

everyone to not only understand what accessibility is but feel like they have the toolkit

and the knowledge set to

make sure that the products and the experiences that we're

delivering to our customers and our internal TMs

are accessible for everyone.

And could you explain a little bit about OneMain

for people that may not be familiar with your organization?

Yeah, sure.

So OneMain provides

different products.

We have three main ones.

We have loans, cards,

and insurance.

And we provide those

products to consumers

who might need either a personal loan or auto loan, or,

like I said,

we also have cards where someone can take a credit card.

Well, you already alluded a little bit to your

interests in the technical side of things,

but it'd be

great if you could tell us a little bit more about your background,

kind of what your work-life path was,

and then what the touchpoints were that

first got you involved in accessibility. Yeah.

So I have a background in graphic design. I got my undergrad in graphic design.

But like I said,

I really originally

majored in computer science

but learned early on that computer science is

steeped much more in

non-visual code writing,

and I still wanted to kind of have visual control over it.

So switched over to graphic design.

But then where web design

was coming up,

I just kind of immediately found a great spot there because it was visual design mixing

with writing code.

And then that love of just building things, I've always had that.

So I knew early on that I wanted that skill set to

help others, to mean something.

I didn't really know exactly how I would do that.

I remember watching The Fugitive,

and there's a part where Harrison Ford's character, he's on the run,

but he helps a kid in a hospital while he's running from the cops.

And I remember thinking, "I want to be able to do that.

I want to be able to not be on the run from the cops, but I want to be able to help

people as much as I can

and be able to see that kind of change realistically,

not from far away."

And so that's where accessibility came in.

I found that was the gap between

good design intent and usability,

and it really scratched that itch for the developer side of things too.

Learning those code enrichments,

the ARIA roles and attributes for screen readers and rotors and the semantics,

HTML semantics,

how they played such a critical role in

what was happening in the background of that browser and how it interprets that page,

I found that really exciting.

And so now I lead that at OneMain in both strategy and execution.

So I'm bringing designers together with engineers,

together with product managers,

and trying to build those

repeatable operations around accessibility.

Well, yeah, just taking a step back,

was there a certain project or

certain work activity

or job that you were involved in where accessibility first became

something that you were

aware of and started working with? Absolutely.

So probably where it really clicked,

where I decided I wanted to put

this I wanted to make accessibility my main focus was at

University of Tennessee when I worked there.

But if we go back even further,

I talk about this in a presentation that

I give sometimes.

I think it really started when

I was in college. I was an undergrad.

It was my last year as a senior.

And I ended up getting a

bacterial infection in my eye, and I went blind for two weeks.

And the way that I had to experience that new world

was very enlightening.

And I think that's where I really got the

empathy for what it means to

move throughout the world with a different experience.

I learned so much in those two weeks about how you perceive the world differently.

And that just kind of changed my mindset for

how other people kind of engage with

objects and other people and all that.

So then fast forward toright after I got out of college, I was teaching at Mississippi State,

and then we had an art co-op at the Creative Warehouse,

which was kind of a project that

me and a couple of friends came up with there where we rented out a building,

and then we gave art space to different artists in the area.

And one of the people

who was renting space,

they were renting it was a mom who was renting space for their son and friends

to make work in.

And her son and his friends were nonverbal.

And they would come in,

and we would talk about projects,

art projects, and what we wanted to do.

And I learned so much about communication,

both visual and nonvisual.

That was another kind of incredible experience that, again, it just

continued to kind of galvanize my

love for accessibility.

And then everything just kind of lined up after that.

I worked in New York for a medical equipment company,

and so we were making brochures and websites and pamphlets,

and all of that required certain compliance

and accessibility features.

And then I got the job at

utk.edu at University of Tennessee as the interactive art director.

And we were rebuilding the main website,

and we had executive sponsorship from the chancellors there.

And we were able to set up

testing labs with accessibility specialists and with users,

non-sighted users,

and a lot of different

types of users.

And that was really that was kind of the project that

really kind of stuck.

And so after that, it's just been everything that I did had some type of accessibility

focus to it in some way or another,

whether it be a side project or where I was working.

So all of that kind of built that foundation that I needed to really get to where I am

today at OneMain,

which is confidently building that accessibility program at scale.

Well, thanks for sharing your live life experiences.

And it sounds like, yeah, it definitely was

a regular step-by-step

introduction to accessibility.

And as that was happening,

were there any things that you had to do to

further educate yourself about accessibility?

Were there any kinds of resources or

networking that was part of you

getting to what you know today? Absolutely.

I came into it being just completely ignorant of

nearly every aspect of it.

And you make a lot of false assumptions and

claims at the beginning.

But as you continue to grow,

learn from other people,

it certainly kind of helps.

But yeah,

there were multiple people at University of Tennessee

that certainly helped.

I worked with two people,

and both were well-versed

in kind of accessibility

best practices and things like that.

I remember building stuff early on that was not accessible.

At one point, with a WordPress template,

I took out a lot of accessibility features because I had no idea what they were.

And so in code,

I just removed them and had someone say, "No, no, no.

You need to put those back," and educated me on why.

I learned a lot from people who knew how to use

the accessibility tools like

VoiceOver or JAWS or NVDA.

So watching people use that

was really beneficial.

So I've tried to surround myself with people who know a lot more than me when it comes

to accessibility and just try to continue to

learn from that.

Well, it'd be

helpful to get a little bit deeper understanding of

what your work is like now.

It certainly sounds like you're

at the center of a lot of

different disciplines at your organization.

But maybe you could talk

a little bit about a week in the life

of your activity and/or possibly

some of the interesting

initiatives happening

with the work that you're involved in. Absolutely.

So I started at OneMain back in 2022,

and I wanted to

establish some large goals, some kind of well,

I call them pillars of accessibility that we could build upon.

And so that's still ongoing. We're still working towards those,

but I wanted to establish those early on because I wanted to make sure that every

objective we had aligned with one of these pillars.

And so those pillars that I set up back then that are still

active today were action, automation, and advocacy.

And so everything we try to do,

we try to build on one of those three pillars.

So if I'm often trying to

maybe crash a product

team and say, "Hey, have you made sure you think about accessibility from

this new objective or this new product

or A/B test," then

I might be working with a design team to review flows

and the UI, trying to catch any issues there.

And then a lot of it is discussing how this new flow works with our accessibility personas

that we're working on

for different product objectives.

Then it might be pivoting over to looking at

CI/CD pipeline or DevOps,

where we're looking at running automated audits and helping teams kind of remediate there.

And then just oversight and operational changes,

making sure that you're

building guardrails and

processes that make sure we're checking things in a proactive manner rather than a reactive manner.

So it's JIRA and

tooling and do we need to buy these different

tool sets or this type of software and design guidance.

That's another one too.

So it's a lot of

spinning plates with

hurting cats on top of them.

And a lot of times, it's setting something up, and it works great,

and then you pivot to something else. And then when you look back, it's not working anymore.

It's totally broken down.

Or the person who was working on it no longer works there,

and you have to figure out what you need to do there.

So it's just a lot of multifaceted focus

at work these days.

And I guess overall,

what I shoot for is radio silence, which I know sounds kind of weird,

but I think that's my goal,

is I feel like I'm always being pulled in these different directions.

But if everything's silent,

then I know I've done my job really well because all of those machinations are working

without me interjecting.

So I know I've either done my job really well or really poorly.

And that hasn't happened yet.

I'm somewhere in betweenright now because it never seems to be quiet.

But we're working towards

getting there. It's an ongoing process,

and we're so much further along today than we were

when I started in 2022.

So it's good to see that progress, but we still have a ways to go.

Well, the last thing I wanted to ask about is just sort of a continuation of what you've

been talking about.

And I was curious as to

the organizational structure for accessibility where you're at.

In some organizations,

there's an overarching accessibility

group that then

manages things across the enterprise.

And in other cases,

there's individual champions

in divisions and product groups.

And other times,

everybody is expected to embrace accessibility that's part of the

development process.

There's a lot of range there.

Maybe you could talk a little bit about how things are organized where you're at. Sure.

So when I started in 2022,

I think I was the first kind of accessibility subject matter expert to come on

with the idea that I would be

figuring out how we wanted to kind of build that system and build that

oversight and group.

The way we're doing itright now is

I put together an accessibility action team.

So I've got individuals from

all of the pockets of the organization that

can help with accessibility and have

some either customer or TM-facing

kind of job. And I bring them together.

So we come together we've only had one meeting so far,

but the idea is you bring that group together once a quarter.

You talk about gaps. You talk about opportunities.

You figure out areas where we can kind of

impact and improve accessibility in those areas

and then try to make action items from that.

So as it standsright now, we're kind of working with

kind of a singular point, which is me,

and then everyone in the organization trying to advocate and

educate on how they can improve their lane.

I prefer that because

if you have a team of educated

or of accessibility professionals who are

trying to kind of

govern and oversee all of that

shared platform and

deep into those kind of verticals,

it's just difficult to catch things

because you have to always be watching.

Whereas if you influence

and educate those individuals who are holding those keys, who are pushing out those products,

then it's easier for them to kind of catch those things and say, "Hey, wait a minute.

Have we considered accessibility from this perspective?

Have we looked at the code here?

Or have we considered putting in a GitHub linter here?" And that's worked really well.

We've seen a great impact,

and email has been a big one

where there were a lot of emails that needed to be reviewed that

weren't until we had someone who was able to

who was in that space and then realized, "Hey,

we need to check for

accessibility in these emails." And so we were able to catch those and fix those.

So that's kind of the system that we're working with now.

I would love to continue to scale that even more

and have more people dedicated to kind of an accessibility team.

And then you don't have to have one person who's focusing on all three pillars.

You can have other you can have someone who really just is

diving into the advocacy of it and how we get more of those things out.

And then someone who's really just focused on auditing and the ways to

make that operationally cheaper but more effective,

that would be a great future state that I could see us in.

Well, thanks for

providing such a detailed tour of your operations.

I'm sure that'll be really helpful for

people listening and watching to

see how it matches up with the things that

they're working on. But it's been great to have this chance to chat with you for a few minutes.

So thanks so much

for this. And hopefully, we can meet up in the real world at some point.

Yeah, that sounds great. Thanks for the time. Allright.

Thanks a lot. Bye-bye, Kerry. Bye.