Adaptive Atelier Pays Disabled Testers 80-90% of Client Fees

Disabled testers at Adaptive Atelier keep between 80% and 90% of every client fee, with the company taking a commission per project. That figure sits at the core of the business Toyosi Badejo-Okusanya founded roughly two years ago after walking away from a salaried job to build it full-time.

Adaptive Atelier helps businesses find and fix barriers in their digital products. The method combines automated checks with testing by disabled professionals, who are paid for their work through a platform called AdaptiveAlly. The scan, human validation and support tools run as a loop rather than three separate products: the scan finds issues, and human testers return each time something changes.

"A report is something you file," Badejo-Okusanya says. "What a customer experiences is something you have to keep working on." She thinks that gap is where most of the real work sits — and where most clients misunderstand what they're buying.

What does the automated tool miss?

Badejo-Okusanya points to her own product as the best example. When AdaptiveTest scanned a set of Nigerian fintech homepages, it found an empty button and suggested a fix: add the words "Click me." Technically, that passes. The button gets a name and the automated check turns green.

But a screen reader user hears "Click me" and has no idea whether it sends money or closes a pop-up. Software can flag that something is missing, she argues. It can't decide what a label should say, whether alt text is useful, or whether a form makes sense when you can't see it. She describes a scan as the first pass, not the finish line.

Who pays, and whose mind needed changing?

The first client was a financial institution, which she declines to name. In her reading, the client thought it was buying a compliance report — a list of what was wrong. She thought she was selling a way to see the product through a disabled customer's eyes.

Getting accessibility funded inside large organisations taught her that decisions are rarely made in the meeting. You work backwards: find who signs off, build the business case, and look for the person who owns the decision or genuinely cares. "Nobody approves 'it's the right thing to do'. They approve a case." When accessibility needed money, the minds she had to change were the CEOs and the C-suite, because that's where budgets sit.

How did Barbie and Jo Malone shape the business?

Badejo-Okusanya, who is deaf, grew up in Nigeria and moved to London at 16. She bought a ticket for Greta Gerwig's 2023 film Barbie after seeing its publicity everywhere. Her screening had no captions, so most of the film was out of reach. The same happened with The Devil Wears Prada 2.

A marketing career took her to Jo Malone London, where even the placement of a bottle on a shelf carried weight. She still notices where shops put things and what the sales data must have told them — fresher, woodier scents sold more in APAC, while EMEA customers leaned toward stronger, oud-based fragrances. The cinema gap stands out against that discipline: an industry that thinks hard about experience can spend months getting you into the seat and skip whether you can follow the film.

In Nigeria, she heard "deaf and dumb" often, and deafness was framed religiously, as something to pray for God to fix. London at 16 brought community and her own words for it. "It's the way I am, and nothing can change that," she says.

Why build instead of advise?

She studied law — her family expected a lawyer — then moved into tech. Advising showed her how many solutions could be built, and that as an adviser she would never set the terms: "You make a recommendation, and someone else decides whether it happens." She tried running the company alongside a job for a while, because that made financial sense, but her attention was split. Almost two years ago she gave Adaptive Atelier everything.

She now splits her time between Lagos and London. Lagos gets her in front of executive teams faster; London has legal obligations around accessibility that force action. Neither place has it worked out — they're missing different things.

Her answer to clients who want the badge more than the fix: move the conversation from "how do we look?" to "what happens to a disabled customer on our checkout page?" The real test, she says, is whether a disabled person can complete the task on the platform. If Adaptive Atelier succeeds, the world gets a bit more accessible — and she's not the one who has to explain why.