Melanie Sumner: Why Continuous Accessibility Is a Strategic Advantage

Melanie Sumner, Product Accessibility Lead for Design Systems at HashiCorp, joins Robby to talk about what it takes to scale accessibility across legacy products—and how aligning design and engineering processes creates lasting change. Melanie shares her work making Ember.js more accessible, her team’s philosophy behind their design system, and why she treats accessibility like any other technical concern.

From the pitfalls of nested interactive elements to the strengths of Ember's conventions and codemods, this conversation offers a roadmap for integrating accessibility into every layer of product development.

Melanie also reflects on why she trademarked the term Continuous Accessibility, how it fits into product lifecycles, and what other frameworks can learn from the Ember community’s approach.

“Accessibility is a technical problem with a technical solution.”

Melanie joins us from Chicago, Illinois.

Episode Highlights

[00:01:00] What Well-Maintained Software Looks Like: Consistency, purpose, and bridging design and engineering
[00:02:30] Building a Unified Design System Across 10+ Legacy Products
[00:03:30] Creating Component Requirements Before Design or Code
[00:05:00] Designing with Accessibility Defaults—and Providing Bridges for Legacy
[00:07:00] How Ember’s Conventions Help Scale Front-End Systems
[00:09:30] Who Uses Ember—and Why It's a Fit for Teams with Big Requirements
[00:13:30] Technical Debt in Design Systems and the Cost of Rushing
[00:16:30] How They Future-Proof Components and Avoid Over-Engineering
[00:19:00] What “Continuous Accessibility” Means in Practice
[00:21:00] Accessibility Testing and the Limits of Automation
[00:23:00] Common Accessibility Mistakes: Nested Interactives and Misused DIVs
[00:24:30] Keyboard Navigation as a Litmus Test
[00:26:00] Text Adventure Games and Accessibility as a Playable Experience
[00:28:30] The Origin of Her Accessibility Journey at UNC Chapel Hill
[00:31:00] Why She Avoids Framing Accessibility in Emotional Terms
[00:32:45] Compliance as a Business Driver for Accessibility
[00:35:00] Open Source Work on Testing Rules Across Frameworks
[00:38:00] The Navigation API and Fixing Single-Page App Accessibility
[00:40:30] HTML’s Forgiveness and the Illusion of “Good Enough”
[00:43:00] Advice for Engineers Advocating for Accessibility Without Authority
[00:46:45] Book Recommendation: Cradle Series by Will Wight
[00:48:30] Where to Follow Melanie: melanie.codes

Links and Resources

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