Making Southwest Gas usable for everyone.

Why this work was urgent.

Southwest Gas serves more than 2 million customers across Arizona, Nevada, and California. They brought us in as part of a broader digital push to assess and fix accessibility issues on swgas.com and the MyAccount portal. On a utility site, accessibility stops being abstract pretty quickly. If a customer can't reach bill pay or emergency information, you have a real problem on your hands.

UX Director on accessibility strategy and delivery.

• Ran the audits and the screen reader testing myself
• Sat with engineering to bake WCAG-compliant patterns into the templates
• Delivered annotated recommendations, a remediation plan, and testing scripts the team could actually use
• Pushed accessibility into the day-to-day work of product, content, and engineering so it stopped being someone else's job

What we walked into.

• A third-party MyAccount platform we didn't fully own
• Accessibility issues across the board: bad contrast, unlabeled fields, tab order that jumped around
• Screen reader users couldn't finish bill pay or profile updates
• Emergency CTAs coded in a way that turned a usability problem into a safety one
• No accessibility QA in place, no training program, no design system to fall back on

How I worked the problem.

• Full WCAG audit plus hands-on screen reader testing on VoiceOver and TalkBack
• High-contrast and Smart Invert passes, plus keyboard-only walkthroughs of every key flow
• Heuristic evaluation focused on the flows that actually mattered: Login, Bill Pay, Emergency, Profile
• Usability sessions with real screen reader users to confirm what the tools were telling us
• Worked across product, content, and engineering to prioritize fixes and stand up ongoing accessibility QA

Where things broke.

• Login: missing labels, weak error feedback
• Payment: inconsistent focus order, inaccessible form fields
• Emergency CTA: poor visibility, wrong form usage in code
• Mobile app: incomplete semantic labeling, no dynamic type support

What changed.

• Delivered a prioritized remediation backlog shared between SWGas and SEW
• Shipped accessible modals and fixed the emergency CTA so it behaved like one
• Got WCAG and ADA work onto the product roadmap instead of parked on the side desk
• Raised accessibility literacy across teams and gave accountability a real owner

Tools I used.

What I took away.

Retrofitting accessibility into a third-party platform is rarely clean. You're working in someone else's templates, with their constraints, against deadlines you don't fully control. We made progress by pairing tactical fixes with the slower work of advocacy, and by triaging hard. Emergency information, payment, basic readability. Those got fixed first. The cosmetic stuff waited.

The thing that actually moved the needle was getting people to treat accessibility like a normal part of design, instead of a checklist someone bolts on the week before launch.