This situation has arisen a few times in my career in response to changing international legislation. Firstly, in 2018, when the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) came into effect, and again in 2025 with the European Accessibility Act (EAA). Both of these pieces of legislation impacted the way that non-European entities design and present their online content.

2018: The General Data Protection Regulation: When front-line staff know the score

The messaging of the changes that both of these pieces of legislation required for compliance wasn’t well understood by the organizations that I worked with at the time. In the case of the GDPR, while staff on the ground were aware of changes, we were never empowered to message those changes to users, and trusted our central communications team to handle it. It wasn’t necessarily a mistake to do that, but we underestimated the concern that users would show when they were asked for log-in details to access parts of sites that didn’t require it in the past.

Humans don’t enjoy being forced into behavioral changes quickly; that’s part of the reason behind the self-selecting soft launch concept. But this change, while it had been messaged on the sites that were accessed through our aggregate, had not been messaged directly to our users by us. That’s the distinction here. Our organization made an assumption that our users were just as clued-in to information that would effect their experience as we were… but that was not the case. Through that assumption, we caused a rift in trust between our users and our institution.

2025: The European Accessibility Act: When communicating the change is ‘out of scope’

The changes that were wrought by the EAA were something that I wasn’t at the organization to see come to fruition. In this instance, the organization that I worked for had a site in the EU, so we were subject to compliance with this Act. However, we were also incredibly resource-strapped across the entire organization. There were leadership and culture changes happening, as well. At the time, I was hungry to support web content development — it was my role to do this for a division, but when I read about this legislation coming into effect, I got in touch with our Digital Services team to see if there was a way that I could support them in this work. I didn’t really have capacity, but personally, I believe that a more accessible internet is something that benefits everyone. In addition to that, I never met a checklist I didn’t want to mark off! Sadly, for this team, and this organization, even that was too little; capacity was already stretched so thin that only essential core work was being elevated.

These situations were both really tough to sit with. They involved much larger organizational challenges than I wasn’t able to solve at the level that I occupied at the time. So what could I do? Work around it, of course!

What happened next?

In the first situation, related to the GDPR, I made a visual explainer video of the changes. It was low-key rough, not gonna lie… but it built on the user feedback we’d already received, and invited users to contact us if they were having difficulties getting into their accounts (or making accounts at all). I put this video on social media as a first option. Then, I repurposed the video script into a transition document, and sent both the video and the document to the heads of school. It didn’t entirely stop the complaints — like I said, nobody likes a change that’s thrust on them — but it did mitigate ongoing difficulties a little, and reduce friction for our frontline staff. All of this was completed with a couple of hours focused effort.

Relating to the EAA, while I knew I couldn’t make technical changes to our website, I could request changes explicitly from our seriously awesome web content team. This was a really good opportunity to see if we could clean house a little bit too — at the time, the organization I worked for had a really large site with… a not-always- consistently -applied content strategy. While I’m not sure how the organization in general is working through any compliance issues that surfaced, I am sure that I did the best I could to enact changes that I knew would bring us closer to that end goal.

None of these situations were caused because the organizations that I worked for were operating in a way that was devious or willfully non-compliant. But this is what happens when there’s simply not enough capacity to get to work before it becomes urgent. With a little planning, information like this can have a generous lead time, so that you can panic (just a little) when the real crises hit.