When I was at university, I was given a tool called Audio Notetaker to help with my dyslexia. It let me record lectures, take timestamped notes, and actually keep up, which hadn't always been the case before. I don't think I appreciated it half as much as I should have at the time!
Genio Notes is the successor to Audio Notetaker - same company, same mission, but more compatible with today's technology. I now work as an Engineer at Genio, and recently I have just been part of the team that achieved full WCAG 2.2 AA conformance for both Genio Notes and Genio Present. It's one of those full circle moments you couldn't really script.
I'm genuinely so proud of this achievement. But if I wrote an article that was just about the certificate, I'd be missing the point, because the certificate isn't really the story. The story is everything that sits underneath it, and everything that comes after.
Why compliance is a stepping stone, not a finish line
For a lot of software companies, WCAG compliance is treated as a box to tick. You commission an audit, fix what you have to, and move on. We could have done that too, but that would never have sat right with us!
The reason is pretty straightforward: our products exist specifically to help students who face barriers in education. Genio Notes is used every day by students at over 1000 institutions.
Students with dyslexia, ADHD, anxiety, physical disabilities, and many other conditions, often as part of their Disabled Students' Allowance support in the UK or through Disability Services at their university or college around the world. Accessibility isn't just a feature we layer on top of our code. It is woven right into the fabric of why we exist.
So when the WCAG deadline appeared on our roadmap, we didn't just want to treat it as a compliance exercise. We looked at it as an opportunity to prove, publicly and verifiably, something we already believed about ourselves.
Genio’s in-house accessibility dream team
I am one of a small group internally known as Team Ace: Steve, Kelly, Rach, Mala, and me, who coordinated the effort to get us here. But I want to be completely clear: this wasn't just a Team Ace achievement. It was a whole-team story.
To make it happen, we had to go beyond the checklist. We needed to systematically work through hundreds of criteria, covering everything from keyboard navigation and screen reader compatibility to colour contrast ratios, focus indicators, semantic HTML, and ARIA patterns.
For a product like Genio Notes, our interactive, audio-based study tool, the technical surface area is massive. Everything from the recording interface to the playback controls, and from the transcript panel to the quiz features, had to hold up under scrutiny.
Then there was Genio Present, our tool for building communication skills, which brought its own unique set of challenges to the table.
Developers across every Engineering squad spent months picking up accessibility fixes alongside their regular work. Our testing team was forensically vigilant, catching regressions before they could undo our hard won progress.
Colleagues in Customer Success were fielding detailed VPAT requests from institutions doing their due diligence and feeding that urgency back to us. People across the business genuinely cared, and it showed.
What Team Ace did was keep the core narrative together. We tracked every issue, challenged findings we disagreed with, supported engineers with guidance, and kept the momentum going when the sheer volume of work felt relentless. Across multiple test cycles on Genio Notes Web alone, we worked through the entire backlog. Every single reported issue was resolved.
When Mala sent the message to the team that we had achieved full compliance, the reaction said it all. Within hours, a colleague had shared this from one of our customers in Disability Services:
"You have all made my job so much easier. Because, you know, we were all held to the fire. 'What software do you use? We need their VPAT and are they compliant?' and I knew I was not going to have to do that extra work with Genio. I knew that it was already done for me. I was able to sleep at night when a lot of people were not."
That is the kind of feedback that makes the months of effort feel worth it.
Compliance is where we start, not where we stop
Here is the part that really matters to me, and what I hope shines through here.
Getting a stamp of conformance only tells you where a product was on the day it was tested. It is our culture that shows you where it is going next.
Accessibility is considered at the very beginning of a feature, rather than audited at the end of it. It has become second nature for an engineer to ask whether something is accessible at the exact same point they would ask if it is performant, raising those questions before a pull request goes up rather than after the code goes live.
We've also built automated accessibility checks into our development process, so regressions get caught early rather than discovered after the fact. Our testing team knows the assistive technology landscape really well, meaning regressions are caught and addressed without needing to be prompted.
Some of that is structural and built into our core values at Genio. Accessibility is simply part of our definition of done. We have an Accessibility Guild within the engineering team, which is a community for engineers who want to go deeper, share knowledge, and hold each other to a high standard. We run regular training across the wider organization so that everyone who talks to customers about Genio can speak confidently about what our conformance actually means.
Some of it is more organic. Engineers across our teams test features with tools like VoiceOver or screen readers as standard. When an accessibility question comes up in a code review or a design discussion, people engage with it properly rather than deferring it. Conversations about assistive technology and inclusive design happen naturally in our channels because people genuinely care, not because they are obliged to.
Building with purpose
If you ask anyone at Genio why accessibility matters to them, you will get a different answer. For some, it is personal. For others, it is professional conviction, a belief that good software means building things that work for everyone, not just most people!
Collectively, it comes down to this: education should be accessible to every student. Not in an abstract, gimmicky, or aspirational sense, but actually accessible in practice, in the product, every single day.
If a student using a screen reader cannot navigate Genio Notes smoothly, we have not done our job. If a keyboard-only user hits a focus trap, that is a failure on our part. Conformance is simply the baseline we hold ourselves to. The goal is something much beyond that!
One of the things I am most excited about right now is the Genio Champion Council, a new initiative bringing together disability services professionals for regular roundtables. The aim is to build a genuine community where stakeholders can talk openly about the challenges they face and learn from each other.
Being involved in that feels like the natural extension of everything I have described here. Because the best way to build accessible products is not just to run audits and fix bugs; it is to stay genuinely connected to the people those products are for.
As someone who has been in their shoes, it is a responsibility I take to heart.
