I honestly do not remember how I got into accessibility. I have tried. There is no origin scene, no lightning strike. What I remember is the kind of person I was: curious past the point of obvious usefulness, signed up for every internal conference I could reach, virtually or in person, on the goodwill of a manager's travel allowance and a team culture that let me wander. On the calendar, that wandering looked like a hobby. In reality turned out to be the most productive thing I did.
The conferences bought me corners of the business I had no reason to see. They bought me friends, then mentors, then, quietly, projects that came back to my team because somebody remembered the curious one. And somewhere in all that wandering, at a talk whose name I have lost, accessibility found me.
The hook
What kept me was not duty. It was discovering that things designed for disabled customers keep turning out to be better for everyone. The famous curb cut: the dip in the pavement made for wheelchairs, now claimed by every stroller, every suitcase, every delivery trolley. I am from Romania, where pavements rarely forgive a wheelchair or a pram, so missing curb cuts were never an abstraction to me. I felt them in my wrists.
Then there was Alexa, which I came to see as the pinnacle of what accessible service design can be: a blind customer making a purchase by voice, instead of fighting a screen reader through pages that may or may not cooperate, instead of having to ask another person for help. And the story that stayed with me longest: Show and Tell, the Echo Show feature where a blind customer holds a tin up to the camera and asks, "Alexa, what am I holding?", so they know which item just came out of the box, and can put it away in a kitchen they know by heart, and cook from drawers they arranged themselves. Independence, restored by a camera and a question.
And one statistic reorganised my head: roughly one in four people live with a disability, and every single one of us will borrow one temporarily. Drops in your eyes at the optician, and you cannot focus your sight. An arm in plaster. A phone operated one-handed because the other arm is holding your child. Accessibility is not a niche. It is a preview.
The goal finds the curious
Then a VP set a goal to look at accessibility, and my manager offered it to me.
I have thought about that sentence a lot since, because at the time I knew generalities and not much more. What I had was not expertise. It was a visible track record of being interested. Goals are not handed to the most qualified person in the building; they are handed to the person already standing nearest the work.
I was given two allies, one from each of the other organisations sharing the goal, and we started co-writing in a shared document. They would write ideas, I would watch and learn, and I would bring my sight to it. I took to the rules fast, and the moment I knew them well enough to be dangerous, I knew something else: no working designer was ever going to read them in that form. So I translated. One page, every design area a visual designer touches, text, logos, product images, illustration, UI screens, each shown at Basic, Good, and Great, plus one honestly unusable example per category, because people recognise failure faster than they recognise rules. Then I mocked up the internal wiki in Figma so the whole thing could live somewhere findable. Last week I told you what that framework did. This is where it physically began: one page, drawn because the rules were too heavy to hand to anyone as they were.
The machine
Alongside the guide, we had to build the auditing mechanism, and I want to describe it plainly because from the outside this work sounds glamorous and from the inside it is spreadsheets.
Each month we would sample hundreds of banners out of a much larger pool, selected by formula so nobody could accuse the sample of being kind. The formulas were not mine; I had an ally who could make a spreadsheet sing while I was still selecting cells one at a time. The reviewing split across a handful of volunteers, sized so that no one's goodwill was overdrawn, with a few days to label what they found. Then the checking, then the reporting: visual examples, the categories failing most and the reasons why, and the digging, into styleguides, into regional differences, until a number became a cause. When the root cause was a styleguide, we would go and educate the team that made it, sometimes in time for the next one, sometimes too late for the work already flowing out of it. An inaccessible component in a styleguide is never one mistake; it is one mistake on subscription.
Most of it was spreadsheets. All of it compounded.
Volunteering, the literal kind
Once the goal work steadied, curiosity did what curiosity does. Through yet another networking thread I found an internal, recommendation-only programme of accessibility bar raisers, designers who review other teams' UX for accessibility. I asked my manager to recommend me. I travelled to Seattle for the in-person trainings, where I switched on a screen reader properly for the first time, and then paid the real fee, which was time: volunteering in regular review sessions, shadowing experienced bar raisers while teams brought their projects for feedback. Retail, Audible, Kindle, audiobooks. I got eyes on more of the business in those sessions than in years of doing my job.
Graduation meant leading sessions myself, screen reader on, Figma decks open, and a project of my own: bottom sheets. What the design system currently allowed, what I would recommend instead, and a hunt through live pages for the inaccessible and the edge cases.
What an audit actually looks at
For those of you wondering what actually happens in a review like that:
By the time you sit down, the rules are not on a page; they are in your head, all of them. A team presents in about five minutes, and you run the whole list silently against what you see. When there is an actual prototype, you go silent, turn your screen reader on for a quick pass, hold what it tells you in your head, and come back to the room to say it. Structure first, before anything visual: heading levels and reading order, because a screen reader experiences the page as a sequence, not a layout. Then the words: contrast, and how they are written. Then the controls: buttons that function, forms with integrity, ARIA labels, and the traps a screen reader cannot move past. Then the content: honest alt text, tables that hold their meaning, carousels with real navigation. And last, the check that is never on the checklist: judgment, whether the pattern is even right. Whether this should be a bottom sheet, a screen divider, or simply the same page. That is only the surface; there is far more underneath.
Full circle
Through that same year I trained the whole team of designers, prepared the decks, taught local leads what to look for, onboarded new volunteers, and wrote talks for design conferences. The same conferences where accessibility had first found me. I ended the year fluent enough to speak developer, arguing accessibility into products while they were still Figma files, which is the only time arguing is cheap.
The goal ran through 2022 and 2023, landing at 95% in 2023. The bar-raiser work began around the third quarter of 2023. Then I stopped, for maternity leave, and took the strangest inheritance of all this home with me: in rooms with blind reviewers, I had learned to narrate what I see. That habit followed me home, and it mattered there more than anywhere. Another story, for another time.
This week's move
I thought about asking you to switch on your screen reader tonight. I decided against it. Done cold, with no guide, it is disorienting, and disorientation without a guide teaches the wrong lesson. We will do it properly, later in this series, step by step.
This week's move is the one this whole story runs on. Spend one hour on something you cannot quite justify: a talk outside your lane, an internal demo, a training that is not your job. Take one dated note on what you found there. That note is how volunteered attention starts becoming a specialism.
I still cannot tell you how I got into accessibility. I can tell you the entrance fee, which was curiosity, paid in hours nobody asked me for. Every door since has opened because of it.
Somewhere this month there is a room you have no reason to enter. Nobody can tell you whether it will matter. That is not a flaw in the plan. That is the plan.
Alexandra