How to get recognised (Part 4 of 7)
How to get noticed (for the right reasons)
Part 4 of a 7-part series on starting a career in Digital Accessibility
Accessibility TestingVocation
So you've done a few audits now. Maybe just the practice ones. Maybe one or two paid pieces. You're starting to feel like you know what you're doing, at least most of the time. And you're starting to wonder how you go from "I can do this work" to "People know I can do this work".
This is the most difficult part. Because the work doesn't really speak for itself. It never has. Quietly brilliant people get overlooked all the time in this industry, and quietly average people get lots of work because they've made themselves visible. for the longest time, I'd have put myself in this category. That's not fair, but it is how it is.
The good news is that getting noticed in accessibility doesn't require you to become a LinkedIn personality or start a podcast. The industry is small enough that a bit of consistent, useful behaviour goes a very long way. But you do have to do something to make you stand out, and it does take time.
Reputation is built on the work, not on the marketing
Before we get into any of the visible bits, this is the important one. Your reputation is mostly made in the audits themselves and in how you deliver them. Not in your LinkedIn posts. Social Media is important, but first you need the credibility.
The accessibility community is smaller than you think. Word travels, both good and bad. One properly excellent audit, delivered well, with a playback that made the developers feel supported and a follow-up that helped them fix things properly, will get talked about. But also, so will one audit that landed like a telling-off, missed key issues and left a client feeling like they'd been lectured at.
The maths on this is worth being honest about. If you deliver ten good pieces of work in your first two years, and each of those clients tells even one other person, you've had twenty conversations that started with "you should talk to..." That's a lot of doors opening quietly. This has happened many times throughout my career and its hands-down the best way to find new work.
How to position yourself
If you're starting out, it's likely that your first piece of paid work will be as a sub-contractor or it will be for a small client. It will take time to get into the larger pieces of work with larger clients, but with persistence you will get there.
Depending on the type of work you've done you'll be presenting yourself as an Accessibility Tester, or an Accessibility Consultant. The difference being that Consultants do all the work around and maybe in addition to testing. This will include planning, training, setting up workshops, and doing all those things that result in cultural change within the organisation. If you're confident in doing those things then market yourself as a consultant.
Be clear in what services you can offer. If you don't feel comfortable running training sessions then don't list them in your services. I'd also find someone to work with who is happy doing the bits of work you don't feel happy doing. This way you can provide a whole set of services to your customers without them looking elsewhere. When Mobile devices came out I knew I had a knowledge gap on services that I wasn't comfortable delivering so I found someone who knew that area well and partnered with them. That way I was able to provide end-to-end consultancy services with no gaps.
Your Niche
I'm not an expert when it comes to marketing, but I know that finding a niche can help you to develop within a specific sector of the market. You may fall into one accidentally. When I got started, accessibility was a niche in itself, but now the market is very broad you may want to pick a narrower client base to market to. Think about the sectors that you,ve already been working in as you may already have some good contacts here. There are a few directions you can go in:
A specific sector. Government, education, healthcare, financial services, retail, charity. If you've come from one of these worlds already then you've got a huge head start. You know the language, you know the pressures, you know the politics.
A specific stage in the product lifecycle. Pre-launch audits, remediation support, embedding accessibility in design teams, accessibility for QA teams.
A specific user group. Cognitive accessibility, low vision, deaf and hard of hearing users, motor impairments. These tend to be under-represented in general audit work and there's real demand for depth.
You don't have to commit for life. Pick something for the next twelve months, lean into it, and see how it feels. It will help you to focus.
The bigger benefit of picking something isn't the marketing. It's that you go deep faster. Depth is what clients pay for, and depth in one area translates into confidence and speed in all the others.
The network is built by being useful
The word networking makes my skin crawl a bit. Probably makes yours crawl too. It conjures up images of business cards, elevator pitches and forced small talk in conferences.
The real version is much simpler and much less painful. You build a network by being useful to people who can't repay you immediately.
Answering questions in forums and on LinkedIn. Reviewing someone's audit when they ask for a second opinion. Making an introduction between two people you know who should probably talk to each other. Sharing a resource you found that helped you. Recommending someone for a piece of work you can't take on yourself. Working for free on projects where you'll gain useful knowledge or experience.
None of this is transactional. You do it because it's a nice thing to do and because you'd want someone to do it for you. And it compounds. Slowly at first, and then all at once. One day you'll get a message from someone you helped years ago saying they now need some help and and they thought of you.
A specific recommendation for anyone starting out. Pick maybe five or ten people whose work you admire. Actually follow them. Read what they write. Engage properly with what they put out, not with "great post" comments but with something that adds to the conversation or asks a real question. Do that consistently for six months and you'll find you've built real relationships with people you've never met. Just be careful not to hijack other people's posts, and nobody wants to work with a know-it-all. Demonstrate what you know by being humble and helpful and asking the right questions.
Conferences and meetups
Accessibility has a proper conference scene now. TPGI's, the M-enabling summit, CSUN in the States, Access:Given in the UK. There are meetups in most major cities, and the online events have got much better since the pandemic.
Going to these things helps, but only if you actually go and don't just collect a lanyard. Talk to the speakers after their sessions. Ask questions. Volunteer to help. If there's a hallway conversation happening, join it.
Access:Given in Newcastle is one I'd particularly recommend if you're UK based. It's community-run, deeply welcoming and the crowd is a mix of people at every stage of their career. Nobody's going to make you feel silly for asking beginner questions. Labrador was the main sponsor this year and we'll be there again next year. Come and say hello if you make it.
You'll also want to start doing some speaking of your own eventually. Not necessarily at a big conference. Start with a meetup, or an internal talk at wherever you're working, or a lunch and learn for a client. Speaking about the work is one of the fastest ways to be seen as credible, because most people won't do it.
The people whose opinion matters most
The people whose opinion of you should matter most aren't other testers, or hiring managers, or agency directors. They're disabled users.
Building real relationships in the disability community, respectfully and without being weird about it, is one of the things that will shape you as a professional more than any other. Not because it's good for your reputation, although it is, but because it will change how you do the work.
The rules on this are simple. Listen more than you talk. Ask questions. Pay people for their time when you're being paid for yours. Don't turn up in disability spaces to promote yourself. Don't speak for people who can speak for themselves. Don't get defensive when someone tells you something you got wrong.
Do this properly for a few years and you'll notice something. Your audits will start to include things that other testers miss, because you've internalised what the impact of these issues looks like for real people going about real lives; because you've taken the time to work with them. And the disabled professionals in your network will start recommending you to their networks, which is a kind of endorsement money can't buy.
Some things not to do
Every industry has its own particular set of bad behaviours, and accessibility has ours.
Don't become the angry accessibility person on LinkedIn. There are plenty already. Public shaming of companies for accessibility failures rarely fixes anything, often makes the situation worse for the disabled users you're trying to help, and makes the whole industry look like it's populated by people who'd rather score points than solve problems.
There are exceptions to this. Sometimes companies are focussed on profit at the expense of delivering genuinely accessible experiences. They ignore the community and the voices of disabled people negatively affected by their products, refused to engage, weather repetitive legal action brought on by their false claims, and public pressure is the only lever left. But that should be rare, and it should be your last option, not your first.
Don't pretend to know things you don't. This industry has a long memory and a small population. If you say something confidently on LinkedIn and it turns out to be wrong, people will remember. That's fine if you own it. It's less fine if you delete the post and pretend it didn't happen.
Don't use accessibility as a vehicle for whatever else you happen to care about politically. Accessibility is genuinely a big tent. People come to this work from every possible worldview and political background. Keep it about the work and you'll keep the tent big.
The slow path is the fast path
Reputation takes years to build. It doesn't take decades.
Two years of consistent, useful, honest work in public will put you ahead of most people who have been doing this for ten. That's not an exaggeration. Most people in most industries don't do the compounding work. They dip in and out, they post occasionally, they take the work as it comes without ever thinking about how they're being perceived.
If you do the small things consistently, if you deliver good audits, if you follow up with clients, if you're useful to people in your community, if you write the occasional honest post about what you're learning, you will find that in year three or four things start happening that you didn't plan for. People email you about work. Someone invites you to speak. A recruiter gets in touch because they saw a post you wrote.
The compounding is invisible until it isn't. Trust the process.
Where next
Part 5 goes deep on the last bit of this. Building an audience. Writing in public. Finding a rhythm you can sustain. Why one honest post a week beats one viral post a year, and what to actually write about when you feel like you've got nothing to say.
See you there.