Our guest today, Zainab Hussain, is an e-commerce strategist who has built a career on transforming how brands approach growth. With a track record of driving significant revenue by challenging conventional wisdom, she now focuses on one of the most overlooked and powerful levers in the digital world: accessibility. In our conversation, Zainab will unpack why she believes accessibility is the ultimate form of personalization, moving it from a legal checkbox to the very heart of customer experience and marketing innovation. We’ll explore the practical steps for getting started, how inclusive design can actually expand a creative team’s canvas, and what the future holds for building truly empathetic digital experiences.
Your career has been about tearing up old playbooks, like at Vivint where you scaled the digital business to 35% of revenue. Could you detail a specific “playbook” you rewrote there and how that experience directly informs your current growth-focused approach to accessibility?
Absolutely. Looking back, so much of traditional marketing was built on siloed thinking. The old playbook treated each function—creative, technology, demand generation—as a separate chapter. At Vivint, we tore that up. We built an integrated engine where every part fueled the others, which is how we achieved that kind of growth. But the real shift in my perspective, the one that defines my work today, came later when I was at a large commerce brand and witnessed the fallout from a digital accessibility lawsuit. It was this jarring, eye-opening moment. I realized we had spent all this energy optimizing channels but were completely ignoring a massive segment of our audience. It felt like we had built a beautiful store but left the front door locked for one in four people. That experience reframed everything. The new playbook isn’t just about connecting marketing functions; it’s about connecting the entire brand experience to every single potential customer, regardless of ability. That’s the ultimate growth engine.
You state that accessibility is the most scalable form of personalization, yet it often enters a marketer’s world through a negative event. Can you share an example of how a brand successfully shifted its mindset from reactive compliance to proactively using accessibility to improve core metrics like conversions?
It’s a story I see play out often. A company receives a demand letter, and the immediate reaction is panic and frustration. It’s viewed as a pure cost center, a legal hurdle to be cleared as cheaply as possible. But then, as the teams start making the required fixes, something interesting happens. They start by improving navigation to make it keyboard-accessible, and suddenly, they see a drop in bounce rates across the board. They add proper structure and descriptions to their content so screen readers can parse it, and their SEO performance starts climbing because search engines can now understand it better, too. I worked with one brand where this exact scenario unfolded. They began tracking these changes and saw a direct, measurable lift in conversions. The conversation in the marketing department completely changed. It went from, “How do we fix this to make the lawyers happy?” to “Which accessibility barrier can we remove next to improve our add-to-cart rate?” They realized that building an inclusive experience wasn’t just about compliance; it was about reducing friction for everyone and was one of the most effective ways to maximize the value of the traffic they were already paying for.
Given the complex legal landscape with the ADA, WCAG 2.1 AA, and the EU’s EAA, what are the first three practical steps a marketing team should take to begin their accessibility journey, moving beyond just avoiding lawsuits to actively capturing the market of people with disabilities?
The legal alphabet soup can feel incredibly intimidating, but getting started is more straightforward than most teams think. The first step is to simply get a baseline. Don’t try to boil the ocean. Run a free scan on your site to understand where you stand. This isn’t about finding every single error; it’s about creating a starting point so you know the scope of the challenge. The second, and perhaps most crucial, step is to reframe the conversation internally. Armed with that initial data, you can shift the dialogue away from fear and toward opportunity. Instead of saying, “We need to do this to avoid a lawsuit,” ask, “How many customers are we turning away at our digital front door right now?” This transforms the issue from a legal problem into a revenue and customer experience problem, which gets everyone’s attention. Finally, start integrating accessibility into your existing workflows. Don’t treat it as a separate, one-time project. Fold accessibility checks into your standard QA process for new campaigns. Use accessible templates for new landing pages. By making it a small, consistent part of how you already work, it becomes a sustainable practice rather than an overwhelming burden.
You argue that inclusive design makes the creative “canvas bigger.” Can you share a specific anecdote where a design team felt constrained by an accessibility requirement but ultimately developed a more innovative and user-friendly solution that benefited all customers, not just those with disabilities?
I love this question because it cuts to the heart of a huge misconception. I was working with a creative team on a major product launch that was heavily reliant on video storytelling. They were initially very frustrated by the requirement to provide robust captions and descriptive audio for visually impaired users, feeling it would clutter their clean aesthetic and slow them down. But this “constraint” forced them to think differently. They started exploring how captions could become a dynamic part of the visual narrative instead of just a static block of text. They also realized that a huge portion of their social media audience watches videos with the sound off. Their new, beautifully integrated captions not only met the accessibility standard but also led to a massive increase in engagement and watch time from their entire audience. It’s a perfect example of how solving for an accessibility need—in this case, for deaf and hard-of-hearing users—led directly to an innovation that became a mainstream success. It proved that accessibility doesn’t shrink the canvas; it challenges you to paint on it in new and more effective ways.
At AudioEye, you treat accessibility as part of a project’s DNA. Can you walk us through the key checkpoints in your process, from campaign ideation to launch, that ensure every piece of content is created with inclusive principles as the default, not an afterthought?
We fundamentally believe that accessibility cannot be an add-on; it has to be baked in from the very beginning. Our process reflects that. At the ideation stage, our creative briefs have a dedicated section for inclusive experience. We ask questions like, “Who might be excluded by this concept?” and “How will this story be told for someone who can’t see or hear it?” This forces the team to think inclusively from day one. During design and content creation, our teams use tools like color contrast checkers and readability score analyzers as part of their standard toolkit. It’s as routine as checking for brand consistency. Then, in the development and QA phase, accessibility is a non-negotiable gate. Automated scans run continuously, but we also mandate manual checks, like navigating a new page using only a keyboard and a screen reader. This ensures we’re not just checking for technical compliance but for a genuinely usable, human-friendly experience. It’s about making it the default mode, so every piece of work we ship is inherently more accessible and connects with more people, more deeply.
What is your forecast for the role of AI in bridging the gap between automated accessibility fixes and creating a truly empathetic user experience over the next five years?
My forecast is that AI will become the foundational layer for technical compliance, which in turn will free up human talent to focus on the much harder, more valuable work of empathy. Over the next five years, AI will become incredibly sophisticated at identifying and fixing the vast majority of accessibility barriers at scale, in real time. Think of it as handling all the complex, behind-the-scenes plumbing. This is a massive leap forward, as it will make maintaining compliance operational rather than optional. However, AI can’t, on its own, understand the frustration or delight of a user’s journey. That’s where the human element remains critical. With AI handling the technical debt, designers, developers, and marketers can use their energy to focus on the user experience. They can analyze the patterns AI surfaces to understand where users are struggling and then design journeys that are not just usable but are intuitive, seamless, and emotionally resonant. The future isn’t about machines replacing humans; it’s a partnership where AI ensures the digital world is technically accessible, so humans can make it empathetically so.
