Bayer: Accessibility

The Client

Bayer is a global life sciences company focused on health care and agriculture. With over 500 Consumer Health brand websites worldwide, Bayer produces and maintains extensive digital content to inform consumers about its products and health solutions. The company embraces a mission of "Health for All, Hunger for None," recognizing that approximately one in six consumers experience some level of disability and requires equal access to brand, product, and ailment information.

The Situation

Bayer Consumer Health had multiple reasons to prioritize digital accessibility across its extensive website portfolio. With approximately one in six consumers experiencing some form of disability, ensuring equal access to product information aligned with Bayer's core mission. Additionally, the company recognized potential risks to its brand reputation if it ignored accessibility needs, along with exposure to costly litigation in the US market and upcoming EU regulations that would further mandate accessibility standards. These factors created an urgent need for a comprehensive accessibility solution that could scale across Bayer's digital ecosystem.

The Challenge

Bayer's journey toward accessibility excellence presented four key implementation barriers:

• It needed a scalable auditing platform capable of handling increasing volumes of websites over time
• It required continuous monitoring to prevent accessibility degradation as sites evolved
• It needed a platform-agnostic solution to potentially expand accessibility testing across different systems within the organization
• Teams wanted the capability to conduct pre-launch accessibility audits to ensure compliance for new sites and programs before reaching consumers

The Solution

Bayer architected a progressive, multi-phase accessibility initiative powered by Acquia's specialized toolset:

Tool selection: After reviewing several market offerings, Bayer selected Acquia Optimize as its auditing and remediation tool based on user experience, knowledge base resources, and responsive support — all things that would be crucial for adoption across teams with varying technical expertise.

Phased implementation: The accessibility team began with a small subset of sites to familiarize themselves with the platform and develop Bayer-specific user guides for broader adoption, working closely with the Optimize team to make significant early progress.

Technical optimization: Bayer leveraged Acquia Optimize capabilities like source code excludes to reduce the number of flagged items requiring review, taking advantage of the consistent design library and structure provided by Site Studio across all websites.

Proactive integration: The team worked with Acquia to embed site auditing in pre-production environments. This allowed them to assess and remediate accessibility issues before sites reached consumers, reducing risk and avoiding retrofit costs.

Expanding scope: Following success with the initial phase focused on Consumer Health sites in EMEA and the US, Bayer rapidly scaled the program across the organization, with additional teams adopting complementary Optimize tools for SEO and QA reviews.

The Results

Bayer's accessibility optimization initiative delivered impressive outcomes:

Improved compliance: The company achieved an average 20% increase in accessibility scores over the first 90 days, rising from approximately 60% to 80%, with some brands exceeding industry averages by improving from 64% to 94%.

Risk mitigation: The program provided demonstrable progress toward meeting WCAG AA 2.2 standards, helping Bayer avoid potential accessibility litigation, which historically can cost up to $1 million per incident in the pharmaceutical industry.

Efficient remediation: The combination of Acquia Optimize with Site Studio and Site Factory allowed teams to simultaneously apply code-level fixes across all 500+ websites during the next deployment, significantly reducing costs and effort.

Ongoing improvement: Accessibility scores continue to trend upward as the team reviews and remediates additional audit findings, with plans to implement the Page Assist tool as another element in their accessibility strategy.

Organizational adoption: The program's success attracted attention from other divisions and teams at Bayer, leading to broader adoption of accessibility standards and tools across the global organization.

The accessibility initiative is a critical component of Bayer's digital strategy, allowing the company to fulfill its mission of providing health information to all consumers while protecting against reputational and legal risks. The scalable approach demonstrates how companies can effectively address enterprise-level accessibility challenges through strategic technology partnerships and systematic implementation.