About the Customer
The Cincinnati Insurance Company is a property and casualty insurance provider based in Ohio, serving independent agents across the United States. Joel Ross, a software developer and accessibility SME in the IT department, leads accessibility efforts across all public–facing platforms – a role he’s held for five of his seven years with the company.
The Challenge
Before Silktide, Joel’s team was piecing together accessibility audits using free tools plus heavy manual testing. “We were definitely catching things, but it wasn’t super efficient,” Joel explains. They manually scored pages on a 1-100 scale, tracked everything by hand, and met monthly to discuss where each platform stood.
The real problem wasn’t just inefficiency – it was staying ahead of work. Cincinnati Insurance was rewriting their main public website (cinfin.com) and working with third–party vendors. Without a systematic way to catch accessibility issues early, they risked building technical debt into brand–new code. “Our goal was to stay in front of the work,” Joel says. “We wanted to implement accessibility into that process, not create technical debt.”
The Solution
After meeting Silktide at the CSUN Assistive Technology Conference and evaluating five or six other platforms, Joel found what his team needed: a tool that could find WCAG failures, prioritize them, explain them clearly, and track progress over time.
What stood out? Two things specifically.
First, Silktide’s dual approach to viewing issues – both by individual pages and by issue type across the entire site. “When we introduce a new page, Silktide helps us quickly spot if there are accessibility issues,” Joel explains. “If a single page needs attention, we can address it right away. And when an issue is tied to a shared component, we can immediately see its impact across the site and fix it at the source.”
Second, the reporting. Cincinnati Insurance needed to show leadership meaningful progress, and Silktide’s UI made it straightforward to create dashboards, send monthly reports, and “get a good pulse check for how our platforms are doing.” The team also worked with Silktide to separate PDF auditing from their main web pages – letting them tackle each as distinct projects rather than having PDFs drag down their overall site score.
The Outcome
Joel’s workflow transformed from manually tracking scores to systematically identifying and fixing barriers. The team now focuses on major issues first – keyboard traps, screen reader blockers, things that would genuinely exclude people – and works down from there using Silktide’s priority levels.
Having clear priority markers became essential. “That made a big difference for us.”
Marketing and communications teams use it for broken links and content checks. Developers can jump straight to code recommendations and see exactly where issues appear on pages.
Most importantly? Cincinnati Insurance isn’t playing catch-up anymore. They’re addressing accessibility as they build, guided by a company principle that maps perfectly to accessible design: “We do the little things that make a big difference.”
What’s Next?
Cincinnati Insurance continues expanding their accessibility coverage beyond public sites, adding more platforms to their audit list each year. Joel attends CSUN annually to stay current with WCAG updates and best practices, and the team conducts monthly reviews to track progress across all monitored platforms.