Life as an Accessibility Specialist: What You Need to Know
Digital AccessibilityWork CultureVocationAccessibility Testing
Just a bit of context before I get into it… I've worked in web accessibility for 23 years. I came in from a design background with no formal accessibility training. I had a degree in multimedia which for me was mostly 3D animation, which I loved. But fate had other plans and so instead of working day and night on the next Aardman short or Pixar classic, I chose web accessibility. Or maybe it chose me. Well I knew somebody had to do it. It’s given me a long and rewarding career, many late nights, some weekends, no regrets.
Here's what nobody really tells you when you're starting out.
1. A report is just the beginning, not the finish line
This is the big one and it took me an embarrassingly long time to get it.
In the early days I wrote a lot of reports. Careful, thorough, well evidenced reports. And quite a few of them went absolutely nowhere. No response, no fixes, nothing. They just vanished. And for a while I thought that was the client's problem, not mine.
It isn't though.
Delivering findings is the easiest part of the job. What's actually hard is helping an organisation understand why any of it matters, helping them fix things, and helping them get to a place where they're catching these things themselves before you even show up. That's what accessibility maturity actually looks like. Getting it into the definition of done. Getting someone senior to care enough to say so out loud and lead others in the right direction. To some extent that won’t be entirely in your control, but it is your responsibility to attempt to steer things in the right direction. You can’t just fire and forget. Although this is what I did for the early part of my career. I would urge you not to do
A report on its own won't change or improve accessibility practice in an organisation. The goal isn't a good report. The goal is an organisation that doesn't need you to write the same report twice. And when you do get there with a client, when you see them start to spot things early and push back on inaccessible designs themselves, that's one of the most satisfying things about this job.
2. The learning curve is steep and it doesn't really flatten out
I was bad at this in the beginning. WCAG 1.0 was hard to get my head around and I'd never really looked at HTML properly before. I'd done a bit of programming for Macromedia Director and Flash but that didn't help much when I was trying to understand why heading structure matters or what a screen reader actually does with a poorly labelled form.
The company I was working for needed an accessibility champion. I wanted to be that person, so I had to figure it out. I spent a lot of time with the developers trying to get my head around things that felt completely alien.
Eventually I got decent at it. But it took a while. And this isn't well understood: accessibility testing is not the same skill set as general QA testing. They're quite different things.
The good news is that moment when it starts to click is really satisfying. When a developer you've been working with suddenly gets why something matters and starts asking the right questions without being prompted, that's a good day. Those moments happen more than you'd think and they make the steep bits worth it.
The learning doesn't stop either. WCAG 2.2 added new criteria. WCAG 3.0 is coming. Assistive tech changes, browsers change, best practice moves. The people I know who are best at this job are curious and don't mind being a bit wrong sometimes. If you're that kind of person, you'll do well here.
3. Assistive technology takes a long time to get comfortable with
Screen readers alone could keep you busy for years. JAWS, NVDA, VoiceOver, TalkBack. They all behave differently, they've all got their quirks, and none of them do what you expect the first time you use them.
That's before you get into combinations. Which screen reader with which browser on which OS. It's a big matrix and the only way through it is time and repetition.
But once you do get comfortable with assistive technology, your perspective on the web changes completely. You start seeing things that most people building websites have never considered. That's a really valuable place to be and it opens up a lot of doors professionally.
This is also why I'm pretty sceptical about claims that AI can take over accessibility testing any time soon. Testing with assistive technology isn't pattern matching against code. It's understanding what a real person actually experiences. That takes years to develop a feel for.
4. Occasionally you'll miss something, and that's okay
Every expert in a complex field has a process, and the reason they have a process is because complex work occasionally produces mistakes. Accessibility testing is no different.
The job involves a lot of detail across a lot of criteria and no two websites are the same. Occasionally something will slip through. It doesn't happen often when you've been doing this a while, but when it does the answer isn't to panic. It's to have a process solid enough that it stays rare, and to handle it professionally when it happens.
The consultants I respect most aren't the ones who claim to be infallible. They're the ones who have clearly thought hard about their methodology and can explain why their process is thorough. That's what gives clients real confidence.
5. You'll spend more time fighting culture than finding issues
Nobody really prepares you for this.
Finding the problems is fine, that's what you've trained for. What's harder is getting anyone to do anything about them. Getting a developer to reprioritise their sprint. Getting a designer to rethink something they're proud of. Getting a product owner to hold a release.
I have sat in a meeting and heard someone say, completely seriously, "until someone gets sued I can't see the point." And without someone senior who has actually decided that this matters, that attitude is really hard to shift.
The flip side is that when you find an organisation that gets it, or help one get there, it's brilliant. No two clients are the same, no two audits are the same, and figuring out how to make the case to a particular team is its own kind of puzzle.
And underneath all of it is the reason most of us got into this in the first place. Real people with real disabilities are trying to use these products every day. When you help fix something that was genuinely blocking someone, that matters. That's not nothing.
6. The reporting side is a lot more painful than anyone mentions (shameless plug incoming)
The frustration I'm about to describe is real and it went on for years before I did anything about it.
You finish an audit. Say 40 issues across 10 page templates. Now you have to write each one up: what criteria it fails, what the impact is, how to reproduce it, what to do about it, how serious it is. Then you put it into a format that a developer can work from and a stakeholder can understand and you have to somehow add or link to a screenshot or god-forbid, a video. Then you send it. Then you find out the client has a different version of the spreadsheet that you sent 3 days ago and they’ve added a lot of notes which you now need to migrate back into the version you are working on. That’s not testing time, that’s admin time.
For a long time I just accepted this as part of the job. It isn't a good use of anyone's time but there wasn't really an alternative back then, But now there is…
So here’s the plug
This is why I co-founded Labrador with Sam Donnelly, who built the original prototype and got it to a place where we could bring developers in to take it further. It's an accessibility-focused tool for logging issues and generating reports without living in Excel. There's a free plan, two full reports a month, forever! Told you it was a shameless plug. But it's a good one.
Check out the Labrador testing platform - go on. Make your life easier.
In summary
Yes there's a learning curve. Yes, the culture stuff is frustrating sometimes. And the reporting is a grind until you sort out your process. But this is also a career where the work means something, where you keep learning, and where no two days are quite the same.
The goal is always the same though: help organisations get to a place where great accessibility is just how they do things, not something they bolt on at the end. When that happens it's really good.
Worth all the spreadsheets. Thankfully now we have something better.