What I’ve Learned From Accessibility Work
Designing websites changes when you start testing them through the eyes and ears of someone who depends on accessibility every day.
The weirdest part of accessibility work?
Trying to preserve badly designed PDFs while making them usable for everyone.
The things I see every day
Scanned paper forms
OCR disasters
Image-only PDFs
Brochures with no alt tags
Forms that read “underscore underscore blank”
Government documents that were clearly never tested with a screen reader before being uploaded
Sometimes I open a PDF and within seconds Apple VoiceOver starts reading:
“Blank… blank… underscore… underscore…”
And I just sit there thinking:
How did nobody notice this before?
Or maybe a better question is:
How did people dealing with this every day manage for so long?
I don’t live in this world, but I share this world
I don’t live in this world.
But I share this world with Tyler — my blind friend at ADATester.com.
Before projects are finalized, I often screen share with Tyler over Zoom while testing forms and websites together. I watch the frustration on his face when something simple becomes difficult because of bad design.
Applying for a permit shouldn’t feel impossible.
Paying taxes online shouldn’t be confusing.
Checking out on a website shouldn’t become a guessing game.
Most of these problems are not that hard to fix
That’s what surprises me most.
Alt tags. Heading structure. Labels. Focus order. Button clarity. Form instructions.
Tiny revisions can completely change whether a website feels usable or unusable.
Now I design with Tyler in mind
When I design websites, I constantly think
Can Tyler hear this correctly?
Can he navigate this?
Can he complete this form without frustration?
Can he understand what information is being requested?
Daily I check my work:
Alt tags… check.
H1… check.
Labels… check.
Keyboard testing… check.
Accessibility has changed the way I think about design entirely.
This is the year to become a better designer
AI is becoming one of the best tools web designers have for improving accessibility, refining code, catching issues faster, and polishing experiences that used to take much longer manually.
The tools we have in our hands right now are incredible.
This is the year to become a better designer.
Some days it’s exhausting because I could spend every waking minute improving SEO, accessibility, content flow, mobile usability, navigation, and design structure.
But I genuinely love helping clients improve the digital systems they rely on every day.
Life is short.
Learn constantly. Fix what you can. Make things easier for people. And hopefully make someone smile along the way.