My Journey Toward Accessibility

My journey to accessibility began by chance—and with a lesson I really should have learned back in my childhood. In my new job, everything was going smoothly: a good salary, an exciting project on the horizon, and plenty of new technologies. Then there was “accessibility” on the list. I thought to myself, “No big deal—the leads will handle that. I’m just a junior, after all.” I quickly Googled a few facts so I wouldn’t seem completely unprepared, and that was it. But one day before the project kicked off, I got a shock: I tore my bicep—an accident that delayed my start by half a year. When I finally joined the project, the basic framework was already in place, and I jumped right into the features. Accessibility? A side issue for me. “The design system will take care of that,” I thought at the time. Over time, I took on more and more responsibility for the front ends. Then came the point where we needed AAA-level accessibility to release the product. That’s when it became clear: I had to dive deep into the subject. Testing tab navigation, trying out zoom, checking contrasts, simulating different screen sizes. The list of issues? Huge. Even after the first fixes, it barely got any shorter. With every test, the mouse took more and more of a back seat. Instead, I worked almost exclusively with the keyboard. And that’s exactly when the reality hit: even well-known sites had massive flaws. On Google Search, the main link wasn’t in the tab order. On other sites, pop-ups blocked navigation, and often it wasn’t even clear where the focus was. How could that be? This experience completely changed my perspective. And yet I really should have known better. As a child, I was confined to a wheelchair for a while. Our school didn’t have an elevator, so older students would carry me—wheelchair and all—up the stairs. It was kind of funny as a kid, but definitely not dignified for an adult. Today, I see websites through a completely different lens. Poor contrast, illogical layouts—things like that catch my eye immediately. The first thing I always test is: Can I navigate everything using just the keyboard? Accessibility isn’t a “nice-to-have”—it’s essential. Especially in development, functional keyboard navigation should be a given—but the reality is often quite different. How about you? Have you ever tested your website using only the keyboard? Give it a try—the results might surprise you.

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