Making WhatsApp accessible for everyone
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Content design lead for accessibility program from 2023-2026.
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What started as a side project in 2023, this work became one of the most impactful programs I co-led during my time at Meta.
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Meeting the European Accessibility Act’s deadline in June 2025, preventing a hefty fine to WhatsApp and making the app more accessible!
What started as a side project led to meaningful impact for every WhatsApp user.The need: The European Accessibility Act made it a requirement for apps that operate in the EU to be 90% accessible by June 2025 or face substantial fines and/or lose their license to operate.
Major AX problems, real impact.
For 2 ½ years, I led an accessibility (AX) program that directly helped WhatsApp keep its license to operate in the European Union, meet regulatory compliance and avoid a substantial 5% fine to its revenue.
Tl;dr: There was a brief moment in 2023 where I had bandwidth at work. I asked for more work and was handed a gem.
Overall scope and impact:
What: Served as content design lead for a major AX compliance program, coordinating task triage, training, and execution across a 20+ person design organization to meet European regulatory requirements.
Scale: Managed completion of 1,000+ AX tasks across the product, directly preventing risk of substantial fines for non-compliance.
How: Built the compliance work stream from scratch — created training resources, hosted weekly office hours, led workshops and bug-fix sprints, and developed a centralized AX specification workflow to streamline engineering handoff. Presented inclusive design practices to 1,100+ attendees at a company-wide summit.
Result: Met the regulatory deadline on time. Improved product AX scores: non-functional user flows decreased from 26% to 15%, with measurable improvements across functional and fairly-functional categories.
AX wins by the numbers
Tasks completed
1000s
Non-functional flows
26% to 15%
Functional flows
-% to -%
Minimum viable product score
From 3 to 5