Accessibility partners driving innovation and impact

Accessibility is becoming a key strategy for Microsoft partners to transform innovation into real customer outcomes, especially in areas like AI, employee experience, compliance, and digital transformation. It’s no longer just a minor requirement or a task to fix later. Increasingly, customers are factoring accessibility into their evaluations of digital trust, platform readiness, outreach, and long-term transformation stability.

This shift presents a fantastic opportunity for partners. The Microsoft Marketplace offers accessibility-focused Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) a solid avenue to translate accessibility-first innovations into real customer value and scalable success. Recent offerings from Level Access and Inclusively illustrate how partners can initiate broader discussions, assist customers in making informed platform choices, reduce friction in both employee and customer journeys, and embed trust in transformation initiatives from the outset.

When partners integrate accessibility into their solution discussions, they make it more relevant for customers and can tie it to funded business results.

Enable customers to incorporate accessibility into their daily operations with Level Access.

The Level Access platform promotes a continuous accessibility approach throughout design, development, governance, and training workflows. This makes it easier for partners to frame accessibility as an ongoing capability linked to risk management, remediation speed, and measurable advancements, rather than as a one-off audit or temporary solution.

Companies can enhance the Level Access platform with private offers, such as LevelDocs for creating accessible content in Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint; LevelCI for automated web accessibility checks in CI/CD pipelines; and Mobile Testing for assessing iOS and Android accessibility across both physical and virtual devices.

Enhance employee retention and experience with Inclusively.

Many organisations have made significant investments in benefits, workplace accommodations, mental health support, and employee resources. Yet, many employees are often unaware of what’s available or how to access it. Retain Connector by Inclusively addresses this gap by integrating into the tools that employees already use, offering partners a stronger method to support HR and employee experience goals like retention, inclusion, and program engagement.

Implemented within Microsoft Teams, SharePoint, Outlook, and Microsoft 365 without needing heavy integrations, Retain acts as an intelligence layer, allowing employees to express their needs in simple terms and connecting them to appropriate benefits and resources via Inclusively’s Success Enabler framework. This anonymous, conversational approach reduces barriers for employees who may feel uncomfortable disclosing their needs or dealing with a fragmented benefits structure.

For HR and team leaders, Retain also provides real-time insights into the benefits and challenges employees face. This information helps organisations understand unaddressed needs, allocate benefits more effectively, and manifest a stronger commitment to inclusion.

However, simply being listed on the Marketplace isn’t enough for growth. Accessibility ISVs thrive when they create clear packages, organise needed assets for partners and customers, and enhance visibility for consistent engagement. This includes having a concise value proposition, a well-defined customer scenario, demonstration and architecture materials, and a marketplace strategy that facilitates discovery, alignment, and follow-through.

Microsoft also helps customers understand accessibility within a business context, rather than as an abstract concept. Through ISV Success programs, marketplace enablement, hackathons and inclusion challenges, as well as events like the Ability Summit, Microsoft enables partners to showcase practical solutions closely linked to real customer scenarios. This approach makes accessibility more relatable to customer priorities and easier to implement across the ecosystem.

Accessibility ISVs can achieve scalable success by making offers easy to find, aligning with key customer objectives they can support effectively, and demonstrating value through concrete examples like hackathons, Copilot training sessions, consulting assessments, and documented customer experiences. These strategies help transition accessibility from a vital idea to a well-funded priority. If you’re developing accessibility solutions on Microsoft platforms, the Microsoft Accessibility Partner Onboarding Guide is a great starting point for building, publishing, and operationalising solutions that create substantial customer impact.

If you want to learn more about accessibility at Microsoft, please contact Angela Lean.