Product Designer, Accessibility
Remote • San Francisco • FullTime
Posted 3d ago
About the job
OpenAI is seeking a Product Designer, Accessibility to lead the company-wide accessibility program. This role involves a blend of strategic planning and hands-on product design, focusing on advocating for disabled individuals, removing barriers in customer journeys, and establishing lasting ownership of accessibility initiatives across the organization. You will have the opportunity to shape accessibility for a new generation of products across various platforms, ensuring inclusive and genuinely useful experiences that go beyond minimum compliance. This position requires collaboration with design, engineering, research, product, go-to-market, and legal teams to embed accessibility as a core aspect of product quality.
Responsibilities
- Define OpenAI’s accessibility strategy, roadmap, governance, priorities, and measures of progress.
- Design and ship accessible experiences while identifying systemic barriers across complete customer journeys.
- Build accessibility into our design system through inclusive components, tokens, interaction patterns, Figma libraries, documentation, and engineering guardrails.
- Center disabled people through participatory research, usability studies, and assistive-technology testing.
- Design for permanent, temporary, and situational disabilities, including multiple ways to perceive information, navigate interfaces, understand content, and complete important tasks.
- Establish practical standards for screen readers, keyboard navigation, focus, reading order, contrast, typography, motion, captions, forms, errors, and multimodal interactions.
- Lead accessibility audits, remediation priorities, launch readiness, and continuous validation across platforms.
- Partner with go-to-market, legal, compliance, and product teams on enterprise readiness, accessibility documentation, procurement needs, and customer commitments.
- Grow company-wide capability through training, critiques, engineering partnerships, and a network of accessibility champions.
Requirements
- Led accessibility or inclusive-design work across multiple teams, products, or platforms.
- Possess deep accessibility expertise combined with strong interaction design, systems thinking, and a high bar for product craft.
- Understand the relationship between accessibility, usability, and inclusive design, and know when to go beyond standards to meet real human needs.
- Have deep practical knowledge of WCAG, assistive technologies, accessible interaction design, and platform-specific standards.
- Embedded accessibility into design systems, reusable components, and engineering workflows.
- Worked directly with disabled people and translated their experiences into meaningful product and organizational decisions.
- Can identify assumptions and exclusion within a product journey, then turn those insights into clearer and more flexible ways to interact.
- Equally effective setting strategy, designing detailed experiences, and collaborating with engineers through implementation.
- Can influence across disciplines without direct authority, creating shared accountability without becoming a centralized approval gate.