Accessibility, career
Building an audience (Part 5 of 7)
Accessibility TestingVocation
The last part of this series was about being noticed by the people who might hire you to work with them. This part is related but different. It's about building an audience.
An audience is just a group of people who recognise your name and trust your opinion. That's it. It doesn't mean followers. It doesn't mean fans. It's not about the numbers. It means that when you post something, some people will read it, and some of those people will be the right people, some will become your friends and colleagues.
Many people who are focussed on testing avoid this bit. They feel weird about self-promotion, or they don't think they've got anything special to say, or they tried posting a few times, got no engagement, and gave up. All of that is understandable. But building an audience is one of the highest-leverage things you can do in any career, and and only a few people in accessibility are doing it well.
Why bother
The obvious answer is that it brings you work. And it does. People who follow you on LinkedIn or read your blog will DM you six months later asking if you're free for an audit. That happens all the time.
Writing also helps you to think about things carefully and a useful by-product of sitting down and writing an article, is that you become a little bit better at the subject you're writing about.
Beyond that, writing in public builds a body of work. After a couple of years of posting even semi-consistently, you have a searchable, linkable, shareable set of things you've said about your craft. When someone new comes across you, they can go and read six posts and get a feel for how you think and find out if you're a good match for their work.
And there's a compounding thing that's hard to describe until you've experienced it. The people who follow you start to feel like they know you. When they need someone, or when someone they know needs someone, you're the one that will come to mind.
What you bring to the table
Most people don't start posting because they think they don't have anything to say or they are embarrassed to put their opinion out there for all to see. It makes you feel vulnerable.
I get this. When I first started writing about accessibility I felt like everyone else knew more than me and the reality is that most of them did.
But there's something to keep in mind. Everyone knows a different subset of "obvious". The things that are obvious to you is not obvious to the person who just started looking at accessibility today. That person is much more likely to read your post than the person who is many years ahead of you.
Write about the thing you just learned. Write about the audit you just finished (with the client's identity protected, obviously). Write about the mistake you just made and what it taught you. Write about the WCAG criterion you finally got your head around. Other people will have been struggling with it too.
One thing I would strongly warn against is AI slop. I'm not saying not to use AI at all. It's useful sometimes, I use it myself. but if you're going to ask AI to give you some topics to post on LinkedIn 2-3 times per week to copy and paste, people are going to start muting or unfollowing you. Your content will stand out for all the wrong reasons and it will make you look like you don't have anything useful to say.
Cadence beats brilliance
One post a week for a year will do more for your audience than one viral post ever could.
Viral posts are lovely when they happen but they don't build anything. The people who like a viral post rarely follow you afterwards or even remember who wrote it. They liked the post, they moved on, and they've forgotten your name by tomorrow. Whereas the person who's seen twelve of your posts over the last three months, even if they've never liked or commented on any of them, is starting to feel like they know you.
So the goal isn't to write a big post. It's to write regularly. Weekly is a good target. Fortnightly is fine. Once a month is where you start losing momentum. Once a quarter isn't really posting, it's just occasional bursts of activity that don't compound. I'm often guilty of this and then I'll make a flurry of posts over a few weeks and they stop again. Finding some discipline for this will go a long way.
The good news is you don't have to be brilliant. You just have to be authentic, honest and consistent. If you're finding it hard to keep up (and you will), make the posts shorter. Two hundred words about a thing you noticed is a fine post. Reposting is also another useful thing to do when you're having a dry spell. Just make sure it's useful.
Where to post
There are more options than there used to be, but the answer for accessibility specifically is fairly straightforward.
LinkedIn is where the accessibility community mostly lives. This is unfortunate for those of us who don't especially enjoy LinkedIn, but that's where the people are. Hiring managers are there. Clients are there. Other accessibility folk are there. If you only pick one place, pick this one.
A blog is worth having if you can commit to keeping it going. It gives you a home that's yours, that isn't at the mercy of an algorithm. It gives you a URL that's the same in five years as it is today. It gives you space to write something longer than a LinkedIn post can hold. But an abandoned blog is worse than no blog, so only start one if you're going to keep it going. Once you've created your blogpost then share it on LinkedIn.
Mastodon has a smaller but sharper accessibility community. It's much less transactional than LinkedIn. If you'd enjoy the writing more without the corporate flavouring, it's a good second home.
A newsletter is a nice thing to have but I wouldn't start with one. Once you've got a body of blog posts and a bit of an audience, then it's worth considering as a way to bring readers into a more direct relationship. But newsletters need something to put in them each month, and if you don't have posts to draw from, you'll run out of ideas fast.
I'm not going to talk about podcasting here as it's outside of my experience right now, but it's something I'd like to do in the future. Maybe I can post about it in the future.
What to actually write about
If you're stuck, here are the kinds of posts that work well in accessibility.
The thing you just learned. Straightforward. You picked something up on the last audit, you write a short post explaining it, you're done. The reader learns something. You've cemented your own understanding. Everyone wins.
The mistake you made. These can be gold. Honesty about mistakes is rare in professional posting and it lands hard when someone does it. It also makes you look more, not less, credible. The confident-mistake-owner is a much more trustworthy figure than the person who's never publicly wrong.
The thing you disagree with. Not a rant. A considered piece explaining why you see something differently to the received wisdom. Just make sure that you've done your research.
The behind-the-scenes of the work. What a typical audit day looks like. How you decided on an audit sample. What you did when you didn't know the answer. People love this kind of thing because most of the profession is hidden from view.
The teaching post. Pick a WCAG criterion, an ARIA pattern, a screen reader behaviour, and explain it clearly for someone who doesn't know it yet. If you can add a code sample or a short video, even better. These posts get shared and stay useful for years.
The recommendation. Someone whose work you admire, a resource that helped you, a tool that changed how you work. Recommendations position you as generous and useful, and they build the network effect we talked about in Part 4.
The reflection. Just occasionally, a post about how you're feeling about the work. Not too often. But every now and then, a piece about why you're doing this, or what you're finding hard, or what changed for you recently. These are the posts that make people feel like they know you.
The people who never engage
Most of your audience will never like a post. Never comment. Never share. You'll have no idea they're there until one day one of them emails you about a piece of work, and you look them up, and they've been following you for two years. Your name kept coming up in their feed.
This is important because a lot of new posters give up when their posts don't get engagement. It takes time so keep going.
Consistency, when consistency is hard
You will have weeks where you don't want to post. You'll be tired. You'll be busy. You'll feel like you haven't got anything worth saying. I get like this too often, and if I'm very honest the advice I'm giving you here isn't something I'm always good at following myself. I get busy and then I feel like it's not so important anymore and let things slip.
A few things that help:
Keep a running list of post ideas. When you notice something during an audit, or read a good piece somewhere, or have a useful conversation, jot down a line about it. When you sit down to write and your head is empty, the list is where you go.
Give yourself permission to write short. A hundred word post about a specific thing you noticed is a fine post. You are not writing an essay. Nobody is grading you.
Batch when you can. If you've got an afternoon and the ideas are flowing, write three or four posts. Save them. Post them over the coming weeks. 'Future you' will be grateful.
If you're really stuck, ask AI to give you a list of ideas. I'm reluctant to even list this as an option, but it might come up with something that you've just experienced and help you remember something. But as I said, don't just cut and paste an article its written. People can tell and It will do you more harm than good.
And when you fall off, which you will, just get back on. Nobody is keeping score. The person you're worried is judging your lapse hasn't noticed. Just post the next thing.
The Labrador thing
Since this is a Labrador blog, a word on how we think about all this.
Sam and I both write blogs. We know it's important for engagement, SEO and for more people to find out about the tool we've created to help people.
So yes, we're biased. We think writing in public is worth doing. And Labrador has a bit of a role to play here too, in that the reports it generates give you concrete pieces of your own thinking to draw on for posts later. A finding you spent time understanding can turn into a blog post.
But even if you never touch Labrador, please write. The industry needs more honest voices in it, and yours could be one of them.
Where next
Part 6 gets into the big one. AI. What it means for accessibility work, what it means for you specifically, and how to think about a career in this field when everyone around you is telling you all the digital jobs are about to disappear. It's not the scary conversation people make it out to be, but it's an important one.
See you there.