The blind programmers who created screen readers

For most companies, accessibility isn’t a priority, or worse, something that they pay lip service to while doing the bare minimum to meet regulatory compliance. Ojala’s pet peeve is people thinking that accessibility is a feature, a nice-to-have addition to your product. When they tack on accessibility later, without thinking about it from the very beginning, Ojala can tell — it feels haphazard. (Imagine first creating a product with a colorless UI, then to add colors later as an afterthought, only to use the wrong color combination.)

I heard long ago that the reason developers should start testing software with accessibility in mind is that everyone, at some point in their life, will benefit from accessible technology.

At a minimum, as your eyesight gets older with age, an increase in font size will make it more comfortable to read things.

Any story that revolves around a few people banding together to solve an actual problem, and how that solution literally changed people’s lives, is so inspiring to me.

It’s what I yearn for at this point in my life. I don’t mind making money and building apps which drive business value. The stability of my job has done wonders for my mental health, and I am supremely grateful that I have it.

But boy, wouldn’t it be fun to get to work on something that has an outsized positive impact on people’s ability to live productive lives?