Firestarting: My Passion for Accessible Design
The smallest of changes can bring pure joy. Fonts, colours, images, layouts, icons, words. Removing friction and noise. Increasing impact. Enabling accessibility. Something like a tiny icon on a website that was grey previously, but you change it to white. Something that the users wouldn't consciously notice if it hadn’t been changed, but subconsciously their brain notices that it works better.
A couple of years ago, I started to look into accessibility. It came up naturally with my media GCSE and being disabled. The more I looked into it, the angrier I got with how inaccessible the world is.
At the time I was also going through my autism diagnostic process, which in itself is a whole mess and is one of the most frustrating and dehumanising experiences that a young person could go through. I had all of this anger bottled up inside me waiting to explode. I was so frustrated with everything, the autism process and then the realisation of how inaccessible everything is. I knew I needed to find an escape for all of this anger. That's when I found that accessibility consultant was a job.
The first time I found out about accessibility consultancy was when my dad was telling me about Alixandra Horton and Hector Minto , two very influential people in the accessibility world. Alix (she/her) works for IBM UKI as a Microsoft Alliance Lead and is the Disability Employee Network Leader. She is the founder and leader of the award-winning People with Diverse Abilities (PwDA) Employee Network Group for IBM employees. The work that she is doing within IBM is helping to change the company from the inside out. Hector (he/him) is Lead Accessibility Evangelist for Microsoft and is also the Disability and Access Ambassador for tech and web sectors with the UK cabinet office.
Hector and Alix were my first exposure to accessibility consultancy. Before this I didn't realise it was a job that actually exists! I knew something like this would have to exist, but I had no idea what it was called or any idea as to what it entailed. However after finding out about their jobs, I started to immerse myself into the world of accessibility.
That day ignited a spark in me.
Since then I have been teaching myself non-stop about accessibility, everything I know about it is stuff that I have found out myself through reading articles, reports, social media content, webinars etc. From this information, I was able to confirm that this is the job for me.
From then I decided that I wanted to go into accessibility consultancy. I knew I needed to make a change in the world. I was put here for a reason and until I found about this, I knew that accessibility was my calling.
Since then, I have attended accessibility confrences, met Hector, was one of the first people in the UK to test out Microsoft's new accessible mouse, and worked with companies such as Teens In AI to improve their accessibility.
Right from the first shift with Teens In AI, I knew I could make a difference in the company. I created every post with accessibility in mind, from the colour scheme to the font I used, everything was carefully chosen. As a result, when Elena was looking at changing the branding, she sent over the branding package that the designer had come up with to get my feedback on both the design and how it functioned from an accessibility purpose. I was able to use my knowledge of accessibility which I had compiled over the years to give her construtive critisism on how to adapt the branding to meet accessibility standards.
Read more about my work with Teens In AI