How Zanichelli turned accessibility compliance into a developer workflow with AI.
Zanichelli replaced a frustrating, months-long audit cycle with AI agents that speak directly to their developers.
Founded in 1859, Zanichelli is one of Italy's leading educational publishers. From their headquarters in Bologna, they publish school textbooks, university volumes, and reference works used across the Italian education system, including the Zingarelli dictionary and physics textbooks with over 70 years of continuous publication. They were early to digital: the first Italian publisher to ship a school ebook on CD-ROM in 1997, and winners of the Louis Braille Prize in 2013 for pioneering accessibility for blind and visually impaired readers.
Today, Zanichelli's digital properties span multiple web applications across Bitbucket, GitLab, and GitHub, serving students, teachers, and parents. When the European Accessibility Act set a compliance deadline, Andrea Malfer Poma, Zanichelli's head of engineering, needed a way to make all of them accessible without pulling his development teams off their roadmap.
Reports, meetings, and guesswork.
Before Workback, Zanichelli worked with traditional accessibility consultancies. The process was familiar to anyone in the industry: a third-party firm audits your application, produces a report, and hands it to a project manager. The project manager translates findings into tasks for developers. Developers implement fixes. Then everyone gets on a call with the auditor to review what was done.
Meetings would turn into long debates about interpretation. Experts would hedge: "you can try this" or "this might work." Fixes were never asserted with confidence. The cycle from audit to verified fix could stretch across multiple sprints, and every round required scheduling another call.
The bottleneck was not the developers. It was the layers between the audit finding and the person who could actually fix it.
"It has become extremely frustrating."
Andrea Malfer Poma, Head of Engineering, Zanichelli
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From reports to pull requests.
Workback replaced the entire cycle with AI agents that audit Zanichelli's applications, identify accessibility issues, and open pull requests with suggested fixes, directly in the repositories where developers already work.
The first audit completed in 24 hours. The first pull requests arrived within 48 hours.
When developers have feedback on a fix, they comment on the PR. The AI agent reads the comment, adjusts, and pushes an updated fix. No meetings. No intermediaries. No waiting for the next quarterly review.
Replaces a process that previously took weeks to even initiate.
Pull requests in developers' existing workflow, immediately actionable.
Every issue prior consultants found, plus issues they missed entirely.
"PRs speak developers' language. They're immediately actionable, and they can be verified quickly."
Andrea Malfer Poma, Head of Engineering, Zanichelli
More thorough than human auditors.
Andrea's team ran Workback against applications they had previously audited with human consultants. The result: Workback found every issue the consultants had found, plus issues they had missed.
For a team that already cared deeply about accessibility, the depth of coverage was welcome. The audit surfaces issues that previous consultants missed entirely, and Zanichelli wants to fix every one of them. "We actually want to be accessible," Andrea says.
Before Workback
- close Hedged recommendations: "you can try this"
- close Fixes never asserted with confidence
- close Issues missed in manual review
With Workback
- check Assertive solutions, not suggestions
- check Every prior issue found, plus more
- check Continuous — reruns on every release
"We grew frustrated with our accessibility audits. Workback just works better."
Andrea Malfer Poma, Head of Engineering, Zanichelli
Developers as participants, not recipients.
The shift had a cultural effect that Andrea did not anticipate. Because PRs arrive in developers' own workflow, accessibility stopped being something imposed from above. Developers engage with the fixes, debate implementation details in code review, and see their feedback improve the AI agent over time.
After starting with Workback, Andrea created a new role: accessibility ambassador. Francesco Chiapella, one of Zanichelli's developers, now takes the practices learned from reviewing Workback's PRs and shares them with other development teams across the company. He built an internal guide for accessibility best practices and collaborates with a PhD student at Zanichelli on alt text generation for STEM images.
Accessibility is no longer a compliance task. It is becoming part of how Zanichelli builds software.
"There's a little bit of pride in the developers in knowing that their comments actually work as an improvement for the overall service. It's something that you feel like part of a project where your contribution actually changes things."
Andrea Malfer Poma, Head of Engineering, Zanichelli
What changed.
Audits replace a process that previously took weeks to initiate.
Remediation with PRs arriving in developers' existing workflow.
Issues found than any previous human-led audit.
Developers engaged, not just assigned: sprint planning now includes accessibility PRs.
Accessibility ambassador role created, spreading best practices across teams.
Previous time to VPAT: ~6 months. Zanichelli is on track to publish a more thorough report in a comparable timeframe, covering significantly more issues than before.
"No matter who in your company decided accessibility is needed, the ones who fix it are developers. Workback doesn't talk to your managers. It talks to your developers and tells them what to fix."
Andrea Malfer Poma, Head of Engineering, ZanichelliWant results like these?
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