Accessibility for a Spatial Configurator That Isn't a Shop-Floor Tool

Accessibility conversations about manufacturing software often jump straight to ruggedized touchscreens and gloves. Zammit deliberately wasn't that. There were no shop-floor operators, no offline-mode requirements — the users were engineers, architects, contractors and retail professionals doing digital procurement on web and mobile. That reframes accessibility for an R&D leader entirely. The hard problem here was cognitive and spatial, not environmental. The flagship Retail Shelving Planner asked people to configure dimensions, shelf count, edge profiles, and per-shelf depth and placement — a genuinely spatial task — explicitly without CAD knowledge. Industry-specific accessibility, in that context, means the spatial model must be legible to someone who has never read a technical drawing: clear feedback when a configuration violates a manufacturing rule, units and terminology that don't assume domain fluency, and interaction patterns that degrade gracefully from desktop to a smaller mobile viewport. Standard WCAG concerns — contrast, focus order, input alternatives for a visual configurator — still apply and matter more, not less, when the core interaction is spatial. The principle I hold: accessibility isn't only about disability accommodation; in a domain like this it's also about not gatekeeping a complex purchase behind expertise the user was never required to have.