How Toyosi Badejo-Okusanya Is Building Accessibility Infrastructure for the 35 Million Nigerians the Internet Forgot
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Johnson Olumide
- February 26, 2026
As a child, Toyosi Badejo-Okusanya was often labelled stubborn. Adults punished her for ignoring instructions, interpreting her silence as defiance rather than what it was: an inability to hear.
Growing up in Nigeria, she quickly learned that disability was rarely treated as a public systems problem. Instead, it was framed in terms of prayer, pity, or private coping. Disabilities existed, but accommodation did not.
That contrast became stark in 2017, when she moved to the United Kingdom. There, the National Health Service provided hearing aids as standard care, and universities treated accessibility as a baseline requirement rather than an inconvenience.
“Nigeria showed me how culture and stigma can shrink a person’s sense of possibility,” she said. “The UK showed me what happens when systems create room for you to exist fully and people are genuinely held accountable.”
That difference between cultural perception and structural support would later shape the company she founded.
In 2023, Badejo-Okusanya founded Adaptive Atelier, an accessibility technology company focused on embedding inclusive design directly into digital products across Africa.
The startup works with beauty, fashion, and lifestyle brands to make their websites and platforms usable for people with disabilities—an often-overlooked market. In Nigeria alone, an estimated 35 million people live with some form of disability, yet most digital products are not designed with them in mind.
Across Africa, the problem is compounded by a product culture that prioritises speed, mobile-first design, and rapid launches. Accessibility is rarely part of early roadmaps, and when it is eventually addressed, it is often reduced to a narrow checklist.
Visually impaired users may get image alt text. Deaf users may get captions. Neurodivergent users—people with ADHD, dyslexia, autism, or epilepsy—are frequently excluded from design conversations altogether.
Adaptive Atelier was built to challenge the idea that accessibility is a niche concern.
Two products, one accessibility stack
Adaptive Atelier operates through two core products designed to address both user experience and systemic enforcement.
AdaptiveWiz is an API-based integration layer that allows users to personalise their digital experience in real time. Instead of assuming a single interface works for everyone, it enables people with hearing loss, epilepsy, ADHD, low vision, or other accessibility needs to tailor their interactions with a website.
Once companies integrate the lightweight script or API into their frontend stack, users can activate profiles that adjust contrast, reduce motion, simplify layouts, and emphasise content—without requiring a full redesign.
These adaptations are aligned with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) and have been validated through real-world testing by disabled professionals, the company says.
The second product, AdaptiveTest, functions as a diagnostics and monitoring engine. It scans platforms for WCAG violations, flagging issues such as poor colour contrast, keyboard navigation failures, ARIA misuse, and structural HTML errors.
Together, the tools form what Badejo-Okusanya describes as an accessibility infrastructure stack—one that personalises digital environments while embedding continuous oversight into product development cycles.
Why automation alone falls short
Adaptive Atelier competes with automated accessibility tools such as Lighthouse, WAVE, and AccessiBe, which primarily focus on compliance scanning.
But automation, Badejo-Okusanya argues, only captures part of the problem.
“They can tell you if alt text exists, but not if it’s actually useful,” she said. “They can check colour contrast ratios, but not whether a neurodivergent user finds the layout overwhelming.”
The company’s differentiation lies in combining AI diagnostics with structured human validation. Through its marketplace, companies can engage disabled consultants directly, turning accessibility testing into paid professional work.
This model also addresses a broader labour gap. In Nigeria, an estimated 63% of adults with disabilities are unemployed—adaptive Atelier positions accessibility not just as compliance, but as an economic pathway.
Scaling accessibility in African conditions
Adaptive Atelier operates with a small core team split between Lagos and London, supported by a distributed network of over 5,000 disabled consultants across multiple countries. Since launch, the company says it has served around 5,000 users through audits and integrations.
Its revenue comes from four streams: B2B accessibility consulting, subscription licensing for AdaptiveWiz, marketplace fees from AdaptiveTest engagements, and institutional training workshops for corporate teams.
Still, challenges remain. Most accessibility standards are designed for Western markets, while African digital environments face different realities—spotty connectivity, multilingual contexts, and infrastructure constraints. The company says it is iterating on AdaptiveWiz to ensure it performs reliably under low-bandwidth conditions.
Accessibility as authorship, not accommodation
Over the next five years, Badejo-Okusanya expects accessibility interfaces to become more predictive through artificial intelligence—but only if disabled people remain involved in building them.
“AI will make accessibility scalable in ways that were impossible five years ago,” she said. “But only if it’s built with disabled people, not just for them.”
Adaptive Atelier’s long-term goal is not scale for its own sake.
“The goal isn’t to build a large company,” she added. “It’s to build a scalable accessibility economy.”
Once labelled stubborn for not responding, Badejo-Okusanya is now designing the systems and economic pathways she never saw growing up—making the case that accessibility is not charity, but long-overdue infrastructure.
