Accessibility, career
So you're thinking about a career change?
..and accessibility caught your eye?
You've learned about digital accessibility and you're interested in starting a career in it. Here's an introduction.
Accessibility TestingVocation
I had a conversation recently that I've now had quite a few times.
Someone messages me on LinkedIn. They've been in marketing, or project management, UX or education, or finance.
And somewhere along the way they've bumped into accessibility. Maybe they've been exposed to it through work and there is a need to deliver it (which is my personal experience), maybe they read an article, maybe they've got a disabled family member and you want to make sure their needs are met. And they're wondering whether this could be it. A noble career with a long life-span that actually helps people.
So they’ll send me a DM and say that they’re interested in how I’m doing and ask how they can get started in a career in accessibility.
If that’s you, then this is part 1 of a series of articles designed to help you get started.
Why this keeps happening
I don't think it's a coincidence that I'm having this conversation more often now than I used to. Something seems to have shifted.
People are tired. They're tired of working hard at things that don't really matter. They're tired of quarterly targets that feel made up. They're tired of being asked to care deeply about a company that would replace them in a fortnight if the spreadsheet said so or if a manager imagined that AI could do their job better.
And accessibility, done properly, is the opposite of all of that. It's work that makes someone's day genuinely better. Sometimes their year. Sometimes their entire relationship with technology. You fix a thing, and a person who couldn't use a website yesterday can use it today.
And contrary to popular belief, a well designed accessible website helps a lot of people. And it helps them feel more a part of society rather than an inconvenience; which is how many websites make people feel.
The pitch
I'm not going to pretend this is an easy career to break into. It isn't.
The learning curve is steep and it doesn't really flatten out. The standards move, the technology moves, the tools move, and you're forever playing catch-up. You'll spend your first year feeling like everyone else in the room knows something you don't. Spoiler: they almost certainly do. But they also felt exactly like you do now, not that long ago.
While we're being honest, my early audits were dreadful. Complete lack of detail. No remediation advice. Probably half-wrong in places. And far too militant in tone. Thinking back at them now makes me cringe. But back then the industry was tiny and knowledge was scarce, Thankfully we had a forum we could go to to ask questions or help others (shout out to accessifyforum.com), but essentially we were learning as we went along. No courses, no qualifications, just delusion and over-confidence (personally, that’s what kept me going).
The work itself can be frustrating, too. You'll meet departments who think you're the fun police. You'll meet product managers who treat accessibility as a box to tick 2 weeks before launch. You'll get into discussions (arguments) about whether non-text contrast applies to the border or the background colour (and lose).
It took me an embarrassingly long time to learn that none of that is personal. It's just the job and there’s so much to learn (which is also part of the attraction).
Here's the bit worth staying for. When it works, it really works. You'll have the conversation where a blind user tells you they finally managed to book a train ticket on their own. You'll see the lights come on with developer who's just realised they've been making the same mistake for their whole career and is grateful to know how to do it the right way. You'll finish an audit knowing that the app you've just worked on is measurably better because you were a part of it. People who use the products you’ve worked on will thank you and you’ll get a bit emotional. It’s a reminder that your job is important to people and makes you feel good about what you are doing.
That feeling doesn't go away and it makes it all worth it.
What accessibility isn't
Accessibility isn't charity. It's not a nice-to-have. It's not something you do because you feel sorry for people. It is, straightforwardly, the work of making sure a large chunk of the population can use the same things everyone else uses. Nobody knows how to do this except the accessibility specialist.
Feel free to assume that anyone else you are working with has a very incomplete understanding of how accessibility works and you are the only thing between their product being a success or a disaster.
It also isn't purely technical. Plenty of the best people in this industry don't write code. They come from design, UX, from content, from research, from lived experience, from QA, from project management. If you're worried you need to be a developer to do this work, you don't.
You need to be curious, stubborn in a good way, and willing to learn something new every week.
And it isn't a solved problem. I've seen more than one person assume that because the rules have been around since 1999 (WCAG 1.0), the work must be mostly done by now. But it's barely started in most organisations. There is more work than there are people to do it, and the samples we typically take for manual testing are so small that it normally makes up a tiny fraction of the website or app that we are testing. We can be doing a lot more.
A quick word on AI
Some of you might be thinking "I've just decided to start a career in digital, and now everyone's telling me AI is about to eat all the digital jobs. Is this one about to go the same way?" I don’t think so. And I’ll tell you why I know it’s different.
Accessibility tools will keep getting better, and that's a good thing. We welcome it. We don’t test enough and the manual testing process is painfully slow. Automated checkers catch more than they used to, AI can spot patterns, and that frees up human testers to focus on the things that actually need a human. AI can also help to suggest remediations to code which historically has been a real challenge to those without a background in engineering.
Because here's the thing. Accessibility testing done properly is a human endeavour. We aren't measuring how well a website works for a robot. We're measuring how well it works for people. Real people, with real assistive tech, real cognitive needs, real bad days, real frustration when something doesn't do what they expect.
A machine can tell you whether an image has alt text. It can't tell you whether that alt text is any good. It can flag a low-contrast button. It can't tell you whether the page still makes sense when you're trying to use it one-handed on a bus. That gap, between "compliant on paper" and "actually usable", is where accessibility really wants to live. And anyone who’s been in accessibility long enough will agree that WCAG compliance is a starting point. It’s the minimum requirement for making something work. It’s not the finish line. 99% of websites and apps haven't even reached the starting blocks. That’s not an exaggeration. There’s so much for us to do and better tooling is a part of it.
There's a bigger piece on AI coming later in this series. For now, if you're weighing up whether this career has a future. I was worried about this myself for a while but I can tell you very confidently that it does.
The long view
Most careers get smaller as you get further in. You specialise, the specialism narrows, and one day you look up and realise you've been doing the same thing for fifteen years and you've forgotten what else is out there.
Accessibility doesn't really do that. The further in you get, the bigger it gets. You start out learning WCAG, and before you know it you're thinking about cognitive load, about ageing, about temporary disability, about the way a bad day or a bright screen or a crying toddler on your lap makes everyone a little bit disabled sometimes. You stop thinking about "users with disabilities" and start thinking about all humans.
That shift, from compliance to people, is the moment the work becomes a vocation rather than a job. And it's hard to go back once you've had it.
What's coming in this series
This is Part 1 of a five-part series. Over the next few weeks I'll be writing about:
Part 2: How to actually get started. Learning, qualifications, and landing your first piece of work.
Part 3: How to get noticed (for the right reasons). Reputation, quality, network, visibility.
Part 4: AI is here. Here's what it means for your new career. The thing everyone's anxious about. An honest perspective.
Part5: The 5-year roadmap. What the arc actually looks like from the inside.
I'm also in the early stages of putting together a mentorship programme, partly to help new people find their feet, and partly to try and match them up with real work. Some of it paid. Some of it volunteer. If that sounds like something you'd want to be part of, keep an eye on the blog, or drop me a DM and I'll let you know when it's live.
More soon…