It’s unfortunate that in college, I never learned the importance of accessibility. It’s also unfortunate that accessibility is often an afterthought. Today, I love seeing that accessibility has a seat at the table, it’s a “hot” topic and should stay that way.

Like many people reading this, I learned about accessibility by doing. I read blogs, learned from those around me, took classes, and tried my best to adhere to the guidelines. Years of doing this had me feeling somewhat confident about my abilities. However, one summer, we hired a Product Design Intern who was blind.

She was interested in learning about accessibility in tech companies and we were about to take on an initiative to make our app WCAG AA compliant. I learned more in that short 8-week internship than in many years of growing in my craft.

You don’t fully understand without true empathy.

Though I knew the rules of accessibility… or at least thought I did, I never truly did the user research. In my few weeks with our summer intern, I learned what her day-to-day looked like and how different it looks for both of us. I learned to have true empathy.

I spent days exclusively using different features that support different disabilities.

I encourage everyone to do this! I spent a day or so dedicated to the following:

• Only navigating via a screen reader on my computer.
• Only navigating via the keyboard on my computer.
• Only navigating via voice and mouse on my computer.
• Viewing all websites at 200–250+ magnification.
• Inverting all colors or turning on “dark mode”.

You learn how much longer it might take to complete a task, how many websites are not accessible, and how you can improve your own website. You also may discover UI that doesn’t appear in most cases — such as screen readers having a “skip to main content” button.

We started to introduce ourselves on video calls differently.

For an all-remote team, we live on Zoom! Usually, we don’t introduce ourselves much since we work together daily. However, when working with someone that is blind, they don’t know what you might look like. Our intern recommended we introduce ourselves with our name and a brief description the first time we speak. Here’s an example:

“Brandon here! I have short dark brown hair, light skin, and blue eyes. I’m going to walk through this new feature now!”

We also realized we would reference slides we would screen share by saying things like, “If you look here at the slide I’m sharing, you’ll see the results of the survey”. We learned to improve our presentations by saying things like this:

“If you look at slide 7, you’ll see the results are [summary of results].”

That wouldn’t require an individual to physically see the screen but would get the same information verbally. It would also allow individuals to reference the slide via a screen reader if needed.

We started to play different remote team-building games.

If you’re on a remote team, you probably have played remote team-building games! We play anything from pictionary to geo guesser. Guess what? A lot of our games were visually heavy! We changed things up to accommodate our summer intern and it was extremely successful. Some ideas were:

1. Two truths and a lie
2. Share a song that is special to you and put together a team playlist
3. Share a short story about someone that inspires you
4. Share some bucket list items you’d like to experience
5. General icebreakers (pet peeve, favorite food)

On the surface, a blind product design intern sounds almost like an impossible internship, but it was one of the most rewarding internships I had the pleasure of experiencing. We (the whole company) learned so much about accessibility not only in our application but in our everyday activities. I grew and learned more from that internship than from the many years I had spent refining my craft. I encourage everyone to take time, do user research, and build empathy for the importance of creating an accessible application.