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.