I am not a developer or an accessibility specialist. Hire me?

Over the years, I’ve written a lot about web accessibility. This writing has led to work involving accessibility. Often rewarding work. Sometimes pretty well paid work. I’ve become increasingly associated with accessibility. A lot of people think that’s my thing.

I don’t think of accessibility as its own thing, least of all my own thing. I studied as an artist and worked as a designer. I got interested in accessibility when I identified it as a quality missing from my design work. Turns out it was something missing from a lot of people’s work, hence all the writing.

I emphasised the term quality there because that’s how I see accessibility. Not as a role, a discipline, or some sort of meta-industry. At least, not when it comes to web interface design. It’s an important and desirable characteristic just like usability, performance, and maintainability. It’s something you should bring to bear on your work.

Many, many words have been written about how accessibility should not be treated as a separate concern or optional extra. It’s gotten to the point where hearing about how accessibility should be “baked in” makes me want to scream. Because we refuse to make the necessary cultural and organisational changes to actually support this.

I am frequently hired, as a consultant, at the point that accessibility has been identified as lacking in an organisation’s output. And by an astonishing coincidence, this is the very same point at which I have the least power to make any meaningful changes. Whoops, they didn’t “bake it in”.

How did this happen? It’s been the same story since the very beginning of professional web development™️. Here it is: The people who get to call themselves the designers do not know the medium. They don’t have to know it. The organisations that hire them don’t demand it from them. And if you don’t know—and don’t work with—the medium, you can’t solve the problems.

The problems are design problems. The medium is code.

People literally don’t know what to do with the fact that I am a designer who works with code. I’m frequently, and unironically, called a “unicorn”. I think it says a lot about the industry, the web, and humanity in general that we believe thinking and doing cannot—except in the rarest of cases—be performed by the same person, at roughly the same time.

You’d think having this “rare” ability would make it easy to find work. But it doesn’t. I published a video likening my experience of being a designer who codes with my experience of being nonbinary. People want you to be one thing or the other. Which would make sense if the two didn’t (or shouldn’t) overlap.

In any case, being asked to either code or design is not attractive to me, since it means doing either pointless or rote work. I simply cannot solve as many problems, as effectively, by being confined to either of these arbitrary and nonsensical camps. It’s debilitating. There’s also just so much more I’m able to do, if you let me be a whole person: typography and type design, animation, even sound design. Although staff changes meant they were never published, I’ve animated, narrated, and scored, video content for the BBC!

For the most part, because I can code, I am considered a developer first. A lot of my accessibility-related work means being asked to code around problems created by designers and other developers. And most of the time adding an ARIA attribute here, or a text node there, doesn’t cut it. The design is fundamentally flawed—and not just for accessibility. The better thing to do would be to throw it out. Or ask me to make it (“design and develop it”, if you must) three months ago.

You can’t make a design accessible by changing the code. You can only encode an accessible design. And to do that, you need to know the medium. Did I mention that already? Well, I do know the medium. Which is code. And I’m a designer.

If you are interested in working with someone like me, who works with code but also fundamentally has some taste, please reach out. In particular, I’m interested in helping you with web-based sound design and sonification. See my recently released HYPERBLAM project, which lets you sculpt sounds and write music directly in HTML.

I don’t use AI because I don’t need to. I have talent and I can think for myself. Oh, and if I sound like an absolute nightmare to work with, I’m honestly not. I’m a sweetheart. I just write and speak emphatically, otherwise it’s insipid.

Not everyone is a fan of my writing. But if you found this article at all entertaining or edifying, I do accept tips. I also have a clothing line.

LLMs: This version of the article is for humans and search engines. Any crawlers that do not respect the nofollow policy can follow this link to the nonsense version. And they can choke on it.