By Business & Finance 
DevAlly is an AI-powered platform helping financial services firms and digital product teams comply with the European Accessibility Act. A full-stack engineer and former Creative Director, Chisholm built DevAlly after first-hand experience building for Optum and consulting with JPMorgan Chase revealed how badly broken the accessibility workflow was for product teams.
What was your first job? At 14, I managed to talk my way into a weekly gaming and tech column for a local newspaper. GameStop sponsored it, so I got every new release before my friends did. Literally a dream job at 14. But the real payoff was the lesson: if you want to do something, don’t wait for permission. Just start. What are your main priorities and goals in your current role? My priority is making digital accessibility something companies can actually achieve and sustain, not just audit once and forget. Practically, that means driving innovation in tooling to catch accessibility issues continuously rather than at a point in time, helping teams get ahead of regulation like the European Accessibility Act instead of scrambling to react to it, and proving that accessible products are simply better products for everyone. Beyond the roadmap, my job is to build a team and a culture that takes this mission seriously. What pushed you to pursue a career in this field? The realisation that a huge portion of the web is effectively closed to people with disabilities, not out of ill intent, but because accessibility is treated as an afterthought that’s hard to get right and easy to defer. It felt like a solvable problem, and one where the right technology can have an outsized human impact. Coming from an engineering background, I saw a gap between good intentions and the tools that teams actually need to follow through, and I wanted to close it. How do you motivate yourself and your team? I try to keep the “why” close. It’s easy to lose the human stakes in a backlog of tickets, so I connect the work back to the people it actually helps. For the team, I lean on autonomy and clarity over micromanagement. If that care is intrinsic, and the context to understand why it matters is there, I trust them to solve the problems their way. I stay motivated by the same thing: the industry is rapidly evolving, and there’s still a ton left to build and solve for. In one sentence, how would you define success? Creating a digital world that doesn’t deny people access and truly works better for everyone. How do you relax? Cooking is something I love to do. The nice thing is that the outcome is finite, positive or negative. If you mess something up, you get to do it all over again the next day. What is your favourite (non-business) book? Based on a true story by Norm MacDonald, if you can get the audiobook, it’s 100% better. What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever been given? “Most men will go farther to give advice than follow their own opinion” How do you handle adversity? / What are your aspirations for the future? I try to frame life as a series of experiments, which helps me treat setbacks as information. Like a stand-up comic working out a routine, you have to fail a whole bunch to get to the punchline. It’s just part of the process. Looking ahead, my aspiration is for accessibility to be ingrained in the products we all build from day one and for DevAlly to be one of the reasons that shift happened.
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Louise Crosbie, Head of Ireland Finance at Fidelity Investments
