So you're thinking about a career change? (Part 1 of 7)
Part 1 of a 7-part series on starting a career in accessibility
You've learned about digital accessibility and you're interested in starting a career in it. Here's an introduction.
Accessibility TestingVocation
I've had a few conversations this year with people who have been interested in (or have already started) making a career change to web accessibility.
I'm always very interested in what happened for them to think like that. When I look back, I'm always interested in how my own career took that turn. I was a multimedia designer specialising in 3D animation and making video. I never imagined I'd be doing what I'm doing today, but as soon as I got started I was hooked.
There are lots of reasons why people might get into digital accessibility. It could be because they have a disabled family member, or they discovered a need for it at work and realised they were good at it and enjoy it.
If that's you, then this is part 1 of a series of articles designed to help you get started in what for me has been a satisfying and worthwhile career focussing on helping others.
Why I think this keeps happening
I'm having this conversation more often than I used to, and I don't think that's a coincidence. Something has shifted.
A lot of people seem to be tired of working hard at things that don't matter very much. My brother finds himself in this place at the moment. He's been made redundant and is taking a sabbatical while he figures out what to do next, and he has no interest in going back to the corporate world.
I think it's largely about how people are treated like assets. Companies that specialise in accessibility normally have a stronger focus on people, and I think that's what everyone is looking for today.
Accessibility work is about people from start to finish. You fix something, and someone who couldn't use a website yesterday can use it today. For some people that's a better afternoon where they can do something they couldn't do before.
A well designed accessible website also makes people feel like they're part of things, rather than an inconvenience, which is how a lot of websites make disabled people feel.
What it's like
I don't think it's difficult to find work in accessibility at the moment, but you do need to be prepared to learn, and to keep learning.
The learning curve is steep and in my experience it never really flattens out, because the standards and the technology keep changing and there's always a new tool or a new platform to get your head around. For most of your first year you'll probably feel like everyone you're working with knows something you don't, and to be fair they probably do. What's easy to forget is that they felt exactly the same way not that long ago, and most of them are happy to help if you ask.
I should confess that my own early audits were dreadful. They had hardly any detail in them, no advice on how to fix anything, they were probably half wrong in places and the tone was far too militant. I cringe when I think back on them. In my defence the industry was tiny at the time and there wasn't much knowledge to go around, so we were mostly learning as we went along. There were no courses and no qualifications, although thankfully there was a forum where we could ask questions and help each other out (shout out to accessifyforum.com). What got me through was a mixture of delusion and over-confidence.
The work itself can be frustrating at times as well. There will be departments who think you're the fun police, and product managers who treat accessibility as a box to tick two weeks before launch. At some point you'll find yourself in a discussion (argument) about whether non-text contrast applies to the border or the background colour, and you'll lose. It took me a while to work out that none of that is personal, it's just part of the job, and it helps that there's so much to learn along the way.
What makes up for it is the feedback. Every so often you'll hear from someone who is having a much better time with a product because of something you found, or a developer will tell you they finally understand a mistake they'd been making for years, and it's a nice reminder that the work matters to people. That feeling doesn't go away, and it makes the rest of it worth it.
A few things people get wrong about accessibility
I've been lucky enough never to have experienced this myself, but some people do seem to view accessibility as charity work. What you need to remember is that accessibility makes the product better and more usable for everyone. Features like captions and subtitles, dark modes, good contrast and keyboard access make interfaces better for the wider population, and a more usable interface results in better revenues. Accessibility done well should increase market share and support a positive brand image.
People also assume it's purely technical. Plenty of the best people in this industry don't write code. They came from design, UX, content, research, QA, project management, or from lived experience. You don't need to be a developer to do this work, and you will quickly learn the code you need to do the job. You need to be curious, a bit stubborn, and willing to learn.
There's so much left to do. Accessibility work has barely started in many organisations, and we need more good people in our industry because the scale of the work is much more than people imagine.
A quick word on AI
I had mixed feelings when AI arrived. It wasn't clear how good it was going to get. Did this mean my job would get easier? Would my job still exist, or was I going to be replaced?
At this point I think we're in a good place. AI is helping to do the work, but so much of it still needs humans. After all, the whole point of accessibility is the human experience.
The tools will keep getting better and I welcome that, because we don't test enough as it is and manual testing is painfully slow. Automated checkers catch more than they used to, and AI can suggest fixes to code, which has always been a struggle for testers without an engineering background. That frees people up for the parts of the job that need a person, like deciding whether the alt text on an image is any good, or whether a page still makes sense when you're using it one-handed on a bus with a screen reader.
Anyone who's been in accessibility for a while will tell you that WCAG conformance is the minimum for making something work, and most websites and apps haven't got there yet. There's a huge amount to do and better tooling is part of how we get through it.
There's a bigger piece on AI later in this series, so for now I'll just say that I worried about this myself for a while, and I'm fairly confident this career has a future.
The long view
A lot of careers get narrower as you go. You specialise, the specialism narrows, and one day you look up and realise you've been doing the same thing for fifteen years.
Accessibility hasn't been like that for me. The further in you get, the bigger it gets. You start out learning WCAG, and before long you're thinking about cognitive load, about ageing, about temporary disability, about the way a bright screen or a crying toddler on your lap makes everyone a bit disabled sometimes. You stop thinking about "users with disabilities" and start thinking about everyone.
Once that happens it's quite hard to go back to seeing it any other way.