Career FAQs: Accessibility
This post is part of a series of posts answering the questions that people on LinkedIn most commonly ask about my career. The other posts in the series are on working at Google, product management, and generative AI. Each post covers what it’s like working in that area and tips on how to get into it yourself.
What’s it like working in accessibility?
One of the things I love most about working in accessibility is the community. On accessibility teams, most people sincerely care about the work they do. Their care for inclusion and access commonly extends to how coworkers treat and support each other. And I feel like a welcome guest in the disability communities I have gotten to know through years of conducting user research, designing products, and getting to know individuals who shared their experiences and feedback.
Working in accessibility has changed how I see the people around me, technology, the built environment, and even myself. When I was working as a software engineer on a backend team, part of my frustration with the role was that I felt like I was only getting better at C++, not growing as a human being. Accessibility work changes you.
For example, now I see nearly all technology as assistive, and see everyone as benefitting from various accommodations. (If you can't run 10 miles to and from work every day, then your car is your assistive commuting device.) Disability is a spectrum and I'm moving around on it over the course of my life just like everyone else. I value getting to do work that makes spaces (in the case of my work, digital spaces) a little more accessible.
One challenge of working in accessibility, relative to other technology jobs, is having an impact. The population of users with a certain disability is smaller than the population of general users, and it can be hard to make a feature that is customizable enough to meet a range of needs yet simple enough for users to configure easily. But even if an accessibility feature is only adopted by a small number of users, the positive impact on those individuals can be huge!
Another challenge is measuring impact. Even if a feature helps its users tremendously, that impact can be hard to quantify or justify. This can make it harder to justify a promotion or put accessibility work at risk of getting scaled back when budgets are tight. So people and teams working in accessibility often find ways to contribute additional business impact beyond the direct impact on users. Ways of having more business impact include…
- Demonstrating applications for new technologies
- Producing good PR and marketing stories
- Differentiating versus competitors (or at least not falling behind)
Adding business value in these kinds of ways is often part of the job of working in accessibility at a company with a broader remit.
How can I get a job in accessibility?
There are all sorts of jobs related to accessibility in industries like education, healthcare, and policy. My experience is in technology, so I’ll cover accessibility-related work in the tech industry.
Accessibility: In tech, this term usually refers to adapting a general product to work better for people with disabilities. Accessibility of this kind typically involves meeting compliance regulations of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). For technology products, this involves following Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).
All UX designers and front-end software engineers should be familiar with WCAG and reference it throughout the product development lifecycle. Accessibility should be a regular consideration just like security, privacy, internationalization. If you’re already a designer or front-end engineer, you can read about WCAG and start applying it in your current role!
Once you’re well versed in WCAG, you could become your team’s go-to person for accessibility. In 2018, I joined a team in Google Search as a regular software engineer. The team needed someone to make our feature more accessible, so I took that as my onboarding project. In short order, I became the team’s accessibility expert. It became much easier for my teammates to consider accessibility in their work once they had someone on the team to ask for help. Eventually I consulted on accessibility for many other teams across the Google Search organization. So that’s one path.
Accessibility tooling: This work involves building tools to make it easier for designers and developers to meet WCAG. Without tooling, it’s easy for developers to miss accessibility issues in their code. Good presubmit checks can help catch these issues when they’re first introduced, saving the team lots of effort to go back and fix them right before launch. Accessibility checking tools can help teams find and track issues. If you’re a software engineer, you could try to find a job on an accessibility tooling team to scale accessibility work for teams across the company.
Accessibility testing: Before launch, products need to be tested for accessibility. This is often done by accessibility QA testers. People with expertise in disability and assistive technology can become accessibility testers. Many of the accessibility testers I have worked with are blind. Though I have learned how to use a screen reader, nothing compares to getting feedback from someone who has used a screen reader every day for years.
Assistive technology: People who work in assistive technology design and improve products made specifically for people with a certain disability. I’ve worked on products for people with paralysis, limited dexterity, dyslexia, and blindness. In addition to UX designers and software engineers, these teams need product managers and UX researchers to deeply understand the users.
Even before you get an accessibility job, there’s plenty you can do:
- Learn how to make your documents and presentations accessible with changes like adding alt text to images (for blind readers) and not relying on color alone to convey information (for people who are colorblind).
- Use inclusive language.
- Follow disabled influencers to get a better understanding of what life is like with a disability, and challenge assumptions you may have about what disabled people can or cannot do.
- Consider how invisible disabilities like depression, ADHD, food allergies, eating disorders, and chronic pain might be affecting people around you. When someone asks for an accommodation (e.g. Could we meet for tea, rather than dinner? Can we drive instead of walk?), try to respect the request even if you don’t understand why it is needed.
These are very important if you’re planning to work in accessibility, and just good practice for anyone who cares about inclusion.
In sum, working in accessibility can be meaningful, challenging, and even personally transformative. There are jobs in accessibility for people with various skill sets and plenty of resources to learn the basics which can put you on a path toward working in accessibility.
Best of luck!
P.S. If you have a disability and you’re wondering whether you could work at Google, check out how Google accommodates candidates and employees with disabilities.
