PAC partnered with Clarivate to build a scalable digital accessibility program, combining office hours, accessibility reviews, and targeted trainings to help product teams improve accessibility, document progress through VPAT/ACR work, and strengthen inclusive design and development practices across the organization.

Project Description

Building a robust digital accessibility program across a large international knowledge organization with a complex suite of digital products requires sustained collaboration. Trust is built incrementally: product by product, team by team. Over time, those individual efforts strengthen and reenforce a cross-organizational approach to inclusive and accessible product design and development.

Prime Access Consulting began its collaboration with Clarivate under the leadership of Ruth Starr, Clarivate’s Senior Accessibility Program Manager, to support the organization’s broader effort to deliver accessible products and knowledge-sharing experiences across a wide spectrum of teams, platforms, and user needs. A central part of the collaboration is determining what will work best for each product team while also asking a larger organizational question: how can Clarivate reduce duplicated effort, encourage cross-team learning, and build shared accessibility practices that scale?

PAC established a program built on both synchronous and asynchronous collaboration, structured to meet product teams where they are while advancing shared standards across the organization. The work includes recurring office hours, in-depth accessibility reviews with actionable solutions, and targeted trainings centered around emerging needs across Clarivate.

Office Hours

Early in the collaboration, PAC met with individual product teams to understand their accessibility challenges from their own perspective, including how they were already identifying, prioritizing, and addressing issues. Building that rapport was essential to establishing PAC office hours: a biweekly, and sometimes more frequent, standing meeting where product teams can sign up to discuss a wide range of accessibility questions.

One of the core strengths of these sessions is their low barrier to entry. A team can bring a topic without extensive preparation and leave with a concrete understanding of how an issue affects users, what the team can do next, and how that knowledge can carry into other areas of their work.

For example, the Leganto team brought ideas and designs for a new user flow allowing users to request accessible files from within the interface. PAC supported the team in thinking beyond a single accessible control, helping shape the broader flow, interaction model, and user impact of the feature so that the experience could function accessibly within the larger product context.

Accessibility Reviews

Some accessibility questions can be resolved through discussion, while others require deeper asynchronous review. Specific components, workflows, or entire platforms may need a more extensive evaluation to establish a clear picture of the product’s current accessibility, focus remediation efforts, and confirm that fixes address the underlying issues effectively.

PAC’s accessibility reviews provide product teams with actionable findings and solution-oriented guidance. Spot checks of designs and implemented code help teams understand not only what needs to change, but why the change matters and how to implement it in a sustainable way.

Using this approach, the team behind Market Access Intelligence undertook a complete product review through a series of structured spot checks. The team coordinated closely with PAC to identify accessibility issues, implement fixes, and confirm that those fixes resolved the relevant barriers. The result is a more accessible product and the documentation needed to communicate that work to stakeholders through a completed VPAT and authored ACR.

Trainings and Workshops

PAC also supports Clarivate’s cross-team capacity building through trainings and workshops on emerging accessibility topics. These offerings range from narrowly focused sessions, such as the specific accessibility challenges of tooltip components, to multi-part series on inclusive design and accessible UX-to-development handoffs.

This training model helps teams address accessibility earlier in the product lifecycle. Rather than treating accessibility as a remediation task after design and development decisions have already been made, the workshops support teams in integrating accessibility into planning, design systems, handoff practices, implementation, and quality assurance.

Concluding Thoughts

This collaboration is ongoing. The approaches established through office hours, accessibility reviews, and targeted training are producing measurable improvements across Clarivate’s product portfolio. The next phase extends that work into new territory: communicating Clarivate’s accessibility progress in European markets and responding to evolving global compliance requirements.

The foundation we built together across individual teams is what makes that broader work possible. By strengthening accessibility practice at the product-team level while connecting those efforts across the organization, Clarivate is building the conditions for more consistent, scalable, and sustainable inclusive product development.