From Twitter To Salesforce: Building Accessible Products That Scale

What if accessibility wasn’t a checkpoint but a capability baked into every release? We sit down with Shlomit Shteyer, a technical program leader at Salesforce, to explore how large organizations make accessibility real, measurable, and scalable without slowing product velocity. Her journey from shipping features at Twitter to building accessibility programs offers a candid look at turning strategy into operations and aligning teams around customer impact.

We unpack the practical models that work at scale: start with a centralized core to set standards, then grow embedded expertise through a Champion Program that upskills engineers, designers, and PMs. Shlomit explains why this blend beats false either-or choices and how it creates durable habits across design, development, testing, and release. Executive commitment proves decisive. At Salesforce, accessibility targets sit in the annual planning framework, right alongside feature delivery and security, so teams have time, tools, and a clear definition of success.

AI enters the story as a helpful colleague, not a shortcut. Think agentic assistance that flags issues early, suggests accessible patterns, and speeds remediation while leaving accountability with humans. We also look at a shifting market reality: customers now demand accessibility at contract time, moving organizations from reactive bug-fixing to proactive, compliant design. Collaboration across companies is a surprising superpower too, with leaders openly sharing training methods, metrics, and automation approaches to raise the bar industry-wide.

From global, inclusive training formats to positioning accessibility within the broader trust layer—security, availability, sustainability—this conversation offers a roadmap for leaders who want impact, not slogans. Shlomit’s advice is grounded and human: cultivate curiosity, connect your strengths to work that matters, and build systems that make good choices the default. If you’re scaling accessibility or looking for a place to start, this episode will give you frameworks, language, and momentum.

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Chapters

• 0:00 Welcome And Guest Background
• 1:51 Role Of A TPM In Accessibility
• 3:31 Discovering Accessibility At Twitter
• 6:31 Centralized Vs Embedded Models
• 9:45 How AI Assists, Not Replaces
• 12:07 Executive Commitment And Metrics
• 14:26 Cross‑Company Collaboration Culture
• 17:18 Customer Demand And Compliance Shift
• 20:07 Accessibility As The Trust Layer
• 22:02 Training, Champions, And Enablement

Transcript

Debra Ruh: 0:00

Hello everyone, welcome to AXSChat. Today is Antonio and I, and Neil is doing a big favor for his wife, which is always a priority. And I'm really excited about her guest today. I met her a few months ago, and I was really excited to learn about the work she's doing. So I'm gonna let her introduce herself. Her name is Shlomit, and she is with Salesforce. But Shlomit, please tell us more about your background and who you are.

Shlomit Shteyer: 0:25

Thank you, Deborah. So my name is Shlomit, as Deborah mentioned. I'm I live in Toronto right now, been in Canada for now more than 18 years. I've been in the industry for more than 20 years, but with accessibility, I like to say only around six years, and I'm still learning every day something new. As I said, I live in Toronto. I have three kids and a husband and a lovely dog. And I'm working tediously to make the world more accessible for everyone.

Debra Ruh: 0:56

And I know that you're the director of technical program management at Salesforce, right? And I sort of like that you don't have the word accessibility in your title. But can you tell us more about how that fits into your job? I know it's all of our jobs, but still.

Shlomit Shteyer: 1:13

Absolutely, yes. So although my background is from engineering, I pretty much got into project management or program management, if you will, many years ago and mostly in the tech space to work on releases of product out to customers. As I mentioned around six years ago, I shifted a bit to accessibility and we'll talk probably about it more later on. But when we say a TPM or technical program manager for software releases, this means that you sit in the middle of like many teams who work around releasing a product to customers and making that happen. Currently at Salesforce, and you're right, I don't have the product accessibility in my title. And that just to say that I can do TPM work everywhere, but I currently focus very much only on product accessibility releases.

Antonio Vieira Santos: 2:05

How did you end up working on accessibility?

Speaker 1: 2:10

I love that question. So back in the day when I worked at Twitter, which is seven years ago, yes, seven years ago, I worked, as I mentioned, as a TPM on software releases. And at some point I got bored, which happened sometimes, and I was looking for a new opportunity. And at the time at Twitter, it was very common that you would have coffee chat with whoever you want. It's a very, it was a very, I find a very nice practice that people had. You want to speak to someone about what they do, learn from them, you just ask them to have a coffee chat. And so I did what I call a learning tour. I met with more than 15 people just to learn about what they do. Because I was looking for something new. And I came across a lovely lady named Theresa Marchon. She was the head of design. And she told me about something new. They have a strategy to make product accessibility better. And they were looking for someone who is strong in execution and driving, you know, strategy to operation. And I'm like, oh, I can move mountains. I'm very good in that. And I know nothing about accessibility, but open to learn what it is. And I raised my hand, got the role, and the rest is history. I just fell in love with this space. It was more about learning

Shlomit Shteyer: 3:31

what it means, but it's actually the same day-to-day work that I do as a TPM. You make a product go out the door to customers, but in this case, you want to make the product accessible before it goes out to the customer. So that's my focus. But that's how I got to work in the accessibility space. Just natural, it came into me, I like to say. But I'm very passionate about it. And I'm very grateful that this was a time that I could find this, you know, connection between what I'm good at and what I like to do or what I care about. We miss Twitter.

Debra Ruh: 4:05

We miss Twitter. We loved Twitter. We were so honored when all three of us were verified because of our work, not because of paying something. But we miss, I personally miss Twitter. And we loved working with the Twitter team. Off-air, Antonio had mentioned Candy, Kesselberry, who I believe now is at Amazon and still a really good friend to access chat. So we miss the real Twitter. But I do have a question. Do you think accessibility should be centralized? Like I know some companies do, or is it a little bit of everybody's job? I mean, you mentioned being an engineer. What do you think?

Shlomit Shteyer: 4:43

You know what? It's more to me, it's more like a philosophical question almost, because I've seen it working in different ways. And even in the same company, like even at Twitter, we tried it both ways. And even at Salesforce, we're thinking about it constantly. Do we have a centralized team that supports everyone? Or do we make this skill set or option or responsibility built into the team? And there's many ways you can look at it. But the way I like to think about it is we can work on educating and building that muscle within the teams. But in order to scale that, when you talk about companies with like hundreds of engineering teams, you have to build it at the core. You have to start as a centralized team that kind of like move it on, but gradually educate them to take on and you know, mature it, get the maturity of the teams to take more and more on their side. I know we had we had a lovely program at Twitter that we called the Champion Program, where we were, you know, educating engineers mostly, but also product managers and designers to learn what is accessibility and what does it mean to design, to develop, to release a product that is accessible from the start. And what is the impact on the customer, on the business, on the money that comes into our company, even. And we gradually educate them and made those teams move from stage to stage until they mature and they can handle themselves. Those champions were like registering to this program because they want to become an expert in accessibility and they were having different levels of learning. But that's how we thought about it, to make the business, you know, to scale, because a team of like 10 or 15 or even 20 or 30 product accessibility experts cannot support the full engineering crew. And so that's the only way it could work. It just depends on like your philosophy on how you want to build that. Right, right.

Debra Ruh: 6:56

A quick follow-up and then I'll turn it over to Antonio. And this might be an unfair question, but how is AI going to change the way you just answered that question? Is it going to help us be more centralized or a skill set using your words? You know what?

Shlomit Shteyer: 7:16

It's such a cloud that comes to a world with so many options and opportunities, but at the same time, a lot of challenges. And I think again, the way I like to think about AI or using AI, even in my own day-to-day at work, I think about it as like almost having a companion like agent next to me that helps me, doesn't do things for me or instead of me, more like as if I had another colleague sitting here and I could just turn around and say, hey, what do you think about that? And so there's many tools that we kind of like get to work with. And even in our product, the current work we're doing now is very much around how can we scale or improve the efficiency of developers by making product accessible in the beginning, not have the toll on them, like help them. Not do it instead of them, but help them so they can do more. So that's how I think about AI. I don't think it will replace ever anyone, but not necessarily you were asking about the product accessibility team, if they're centralized or not. How does that help us? It could help us enabling them more. It could help us, of course, if we put it in the product developer, develop faster and fix bugs in accessibility faster or even design better for accessibility, but it will not replace the team. That's the way I think about it.

Antonio Vieira Santos: 8:46

We have been talking about how organizations work, but how crucial is the CEO commitment in driving accessibility initiatives within organizations to ensure that they scale successfully?

Shlomit Shteyer: 9:00

You mean how management, how crucial that management is for it?

Antonio Vieira Santos: 9:04

Yeah, yes.

Shlomit Shteyer: 9:06

That's a great question. I think the for us, I can speak for Salesforce, accessibility is at the at the top of our commitment, like all the way from the company, what we call v2 mom, which is what we're gonna do for the year, and all the way down to the team. So accessibility has measures of success every year. So that means for us, we're on the map of the company. And that means we're doing work as important as delivering new features, we're making our product more accessible, and we're working to get tools in front of developers to make sure they can work on making the product accessible with more ease, like with tools. So it is important, you ask how important it is, it's crucial that you'll have it on the map of the company. And that's if I go back to Twitter days when I said that the story started with the strategy of product accessibility, we were not sure really that it's going to fly. We thought it's a it's a new idea. But this strategy got all the way to the CEO of the company, and they approved, and they gave us a blessing, and there you go. This team just grew and makes sure our product is way more accessible than when we started.

Debra Ruh: 10:20

I know that Christopher Patneau introduced us. We just we just featured Christopher Patneau from Google on the show, and we talked about AI. Great episode if you haven't seen it. But I do find it interesting, and I'm curious if you are still seeing this also. But corporations seem to support each other on projects, accessibility projects. Maybe they compete in other ways, but I see a lot of collaboration between corporations. Are you still seeing that as well?

Shlomit Shteyer: 10:50

Yes, totally. First of all, on the personal note, we have a lot of connection, interconnection between companies like my relationship with Christopher is great. It's been years now. We meet every month, we share ideas, and it's a lovely conversation, but it's also helping us grow our own teams and making sure we we know of each other's work and we learn from each other as well. I think connection between companies are very important. I don't see in the accessibility space any competition because it's it's more about the right thing to do and how can you do it faster. So it's just the opportunity to learn, and I think it's all about connection. Christopher is really good in making connection between people and between companies, and there's more people like him that I really appreciate and grateful for having the opportunity to speak to other people and learn from them. How do they think about this problem space and you know the philosophy we were talking before about where to make the most impact, how to do it right, and how to grow and scale this in such big companies.

Debra Ruh: 11:55

Yeah. I think it I've seen I've been in other fields where people just were so competitive that it actually hurt the field. So I think it's really wonderful. I think we've gotten better about supporting each other, but you know, there's always more we can do to support each other too. That's one thing we try to do at Access Chat. Antonio, did you want to?

Antonio Vieira Santos: 12:18

Yes. When you when you chat with customers about accessibility today, it feels a lot different than it did five years ago, right? And what do you think that has changed it?

Shlomit Shteyer: 12:30

To be honest, I don't speak directly with customers, so I cannot speak to this question. I would say I can see that internally from our side. I see more and more attention to what we call red customers that are because of accessibility. So meaning accessibility is not anymore like something that you know sometimes happens, or customer maybe let you know that it's it's it's a thing for them. We now see it more like gradually as a very like attention to laws that we have and customers that knows to ask, even in the phase of signing a contract, they know to say, we have to apply with this requirement. So I think gradually, I don't know if it's the last five years, but gradually we find that customers know to demand it more, and companies understanding that they need to adhere to that as well and not just think about it after. I would say also, you know, I think I now think about it even more. In the past, we were thinking, okay, when we have a customer that has bugs, we need to take care of them because we need to fix it, right? But now we're starting at the front of when we have a contract review before signing a contract with customers, accessibility is involved. The team is involved to say, do we have requirements in accessibility that we have to adhere? Do we have that? Can we say that we're complying? So we start to think about it earlier in the process rather than just reacting to the bugs that comes in after.

Antonio Vieira Santos: 14:03

So would it be fair today that cybersecurity, sustainability, and accessibility are somehow the layer that supports a modern enterprise? You mean the layer, the base layer? Yes.

Speaker 1: 14:19

Yeah, I would I would even say I think about like the layer of what we call trust.

Antonio Vieira Santos: 14:26

Yeah.

Shlomit Shteyer: 14:27

Includes security, availability, accessibility, sustainability. Those elements are like becoming the trust layer of what we call. And that means it's a basic of what you would have in any contract, any customers that you are working with.

Debra Ruh: 14:41

I just want to thank Salesforce for continuing to be committed openly with accessibility, especially during this really tough times, the last few years we've had with woke and DEI in the United States. I believe that customers are going to remember which brands stood with their values. But I also believe it's part of building accessibility and other critical things into the processes. Do you think in the future it's going to be and it continue to be an advantage to brands like Salesforce that really blend accessibility and inclusion into the processes?

Shlomit Shteyer: 15:20

When you say processes, you mean into the product development process? Yes. And anything we do? Yes. Yes, I do. I think in general, this is like our commitment to our customers. And I'm I'm really proud of Salesforce for the continuous stand in that position. Because we owe that to our customers. We owe that to ourselves. And although sometimes it's tough times, I still believe that it's the same stand. Like we stand for accessibility, like we stand for security. Like there's few values that we're not gonna change. And I'm proud to say that Salesforce is very strong about that.

Debra Ruh: 16:00

Yes. I really appreciate the Salesforce brand because I also feel that they come across as really caring about the customers. So it may be less about politics, and I'm grateful for that. Thank you. Antonio?

Antonio Vieira Santos: 16:14

Knowledge sharing and personal development are crucial for companies. How does Salesforce force to assess a good training for its employees?

Shlomit Shteyer: 16:23

Yes. So for accessibility, we have a few options. Like so, first one is like I described that we had at Twitter, we had something pretty similar at Salesforce that we call Champion Program, where we educate specific people who raise their hand to be like representative of the teams. That could be engineers, product managers, people within the team that comes to a program, get educated, get training, share knowledge, and go back to their teams to help them with the accessibility journey. On top of it, we have many ways to get educated about accessibility. If it's in a form of like a TED talks, like internally, of course, we have workshops. And so we make sure that the product accessibility is very much driving through enablement to scale this knowledge across the teams. And we all, granted, we all know that teams change. People leave, people change jobs, people move between teams. So the old thinking of, oh, I have one champion in a team and they're gonna make that happen, have to evolve. Like we have to think about it. This is something that we have to educate everyone, and also in every level of the product lifecycle, from design, from development, from testing, from all the elements of how do you deliver a product. So we we try or we strive to get that knowledge as a common practice all the time and educate everyone. And hopefully one day we'll have this on the training of the company as well. Like we all have to do once a year security training to pass. I would love us to have accessibility training once a year to see what changed, what's what's going on. And we had that at Twitter, by the way. This was the main achievement, which once a year you had to do training about accessibility if you want to keep working in a company. I value that a lot because it says a lot about the commitment of the leadership as well.

Antonio Vieira Santos: 18:27

Sometimes we see organizations delivering accessibility in a very central way. So, how do you successfully implement it across different locations?

Shlomit Shteyer: 18:37

Locations? You mean geographic locations?

Antonio Vieira Santos: 18:40

Yes.

Speaker 1: 18:41

Okay. So our training, everything is virtual because we have teams across the world. Like it has to support different time zones. Sometimes we do in it even double, like, you know, let's say US time and then India time. And so it's always virtual and it always globally, we don't do face-to-face training anymore. It's all virtual to make sure everyone can attend. It's of course it's includes captions and recording and sign language and everything to make sure that everyone can watch it and have it.

Debra Ruh: 19:10

And I think AI is making training even easier. So that's another way it's gonna help. What is your hope for the future of accessibility? Well, that's a great question, Deborah.

Shlomit Shteyer: 19:21

I guess I'm so invested in what's happening now that you surprise me with this question. I'm hoping to have more investment in getting that in front of everyone. So it won't be such, it's still work of a tiny team as much as you want to grow it. It's still a tiny team working to scale that all the time. I'm hoping to be in a world where what we're trying to do will be more common, more basic, more like something you have to do, something everyone has to learn. Someone, you know, even in universities before you start work, or every company you come to, you will have to learn that. And I hope to get people more connected to it, not because they have to, because it's connect to them. You know, it's not like I don't see my job as something I have to do. I'm really passionate about accessibility and learning how people experience the world and how different people experience it. And how can we make everything like accessible for everyone? Not because they have a disability, because it has to be accessible to everyone. So I'm hopeful that someday it will be more of an easier job, like a given, you know, not something you have to work so hard to make that happen.

Antonio Vieira Santos: 20:38

So, uh what advice would you give to your younger self regarding pursuing a career on accessibility?

Shlomit Shteyer: 20:44

You know what? I don't think when my younger self was ready for this opportunity. So I'm I don't have regret that I got to this space later in my career. I guess I would say to my younger self to be more curious, although I like to think about myself as a curious person, but I I would say to my younger self, be more curious even. Don't just, you know, drown in your day-to-day. Always think about what's going on around you, what people are doing, what's next. And because accessibility really landed on me like unexpectedly. And because I was able to ask different people, what do you do? Just tell me about it. And finally I found this connection, which was not an easy thing to make. Like, how do you connect what you're good at to what you really like, you know, like in your day-to-day. And I think that's that's an amazing opportunity for me to do my best job, like in a space that I really care about. So I think maybe I would say to my younger self, get more curious earlier. Deborah.

Debra Ruh: 21:51

Yeah. I thought you were gonna make a comment, so I didn't, for chance, want to speak over you. But thank you so very much for being on the Access Chat today. I will say. That thank you, thank you for Amazon for keeping on us on air. We are so, so grateful for Amazon. But also, I was hoping that we could turn it, give you the final words that you could just tell us, you know, what your hopes are. But also if somebody wanted to connect with you, get to know more about your work, how would they connect with you? But we are we really appreciate you coming on today.

Antonio Vieira Santos: 22:23

Yeah, thank you, Deborah and Antonio. I'm a very social person. I love meeting people, hearing about them, what they do, what they care about. So I would love to meet with people. Please connect with me. I'm not always so available on LinkedIn, admitting, I'm not every day there, but the best way would be to just connect with me on LinkedIn and I'll make sure to answer and to connect. Would love to meet with other people and hear about their journey as well.

Debra Ruh: 22:52

And I think you're going to the Zero conference, aren't you? Did you tell me that you were going to the Xero Project Conference? Nope, I'm putting it in. Sorry. I'm not going this year either. But also I do know you go to conferences like that.

Shlomit Shteyer: 23:06

Right. I last year I've been to M Enabling. What else was well the year before I went to other conferences, but uh it changed every year, I guess. Which is good. It's good to see the different ones.

Debra Ruh: 23:17

And it's also a good way to meet with people. Virtual conferences, like you said, is very important. But thank you so much for being on the show. Thank you for caring about accessibility. We're very grateful to you, Salesforce. And we miss Twitter. We miss Twitter. Thank you. Thank you.