General Assembly Software Engineering Immersive Lightning Talk on Accessibility

Why I Said Yes

GA SEI built lightning talks into the cohort schedule — a slot for a student to step outside the curriculum and teach something they cared about. When my turn came up on March 24, 2021, I already knew my topic. I just didn't want it to feel like a lecture, so before I built a single slide I had to sit with my own why.
That why turned out to be personal. By training I'm a sociologist and media psychology scholar. Before this program I'd already been a UX designer, a probation officer for the State of Hawaii judiciary, a production assistant at PBS, and a Navy sailor, and I'd spent years supervising volunteers who support foster youth — work that comes directly out of being a former foster youth myself. I'm a person of color, a dancer and choreographer, and a survivor of military sexual assault living with a service-connected disability. This was the first time I put all of that in front of a room and said, out loud, why it matters for how we build software.

Redefining Disability

The talk's core argument: disability used to be defined (in the 1980s) as a personal problem. That definition is outdated. Disability is better understood as a reflection of everyday interaction design — it puts the spotlight on privilege, because most of us have had the freedom to treat accessibility as optional. I'm one person out of roughly 86 million U.S. adults — about 26% of the population — who identify as disabled, and it's a wide spectrum, not an edge case. If a product hasn't prioritized accessibility, it's not because the need wasn't there; it's because we didn't look for it.

Solve for One, Extend to Many

I borrowed Microsoft's inclusive design framing — solve for one, extend to many — and walked through examples of design built for a specific need that ended up serving far more people than intended:

• Slick Chicks, adaptive underwear originally designed to help the founder's sister recover from childbirth, now used well beyond that original case.
• Nike FlyEase, designed for wheelchair users, which also helps anyone who puts on shoes with one hand or no hands.
• Wheelchair ramps, which weren't built with strollers, older adults, or people on crutches in mind — but serve all of them.
  The point: inclusive design isn't about reinventing anything. It's about designing with a community's direct input instead of assuming on their behalf.

Showing My Own Mistake

Rather than just talk theory, I demoed my own project and pointed out where I'd gotten it wrong: I'd wrapped a list of items in an anchor tag instead of proper list markup, so a screen reader announced it as "list with 0 items" — effectively erasing half my page for anyone using assistive tech. I walked through three tools I now build accessibility checks into my process:

• The A11Y Project — checklist-driven accessibility audits; my go-to starting point.
• WAVE — an evaluation tool that flags issues directly on the page.
• Silktide — a simulator for experiencing color blindness, tunnel vision, and screen reader navigation firsthand.

How It Landed

This was a rougher, earlier version of the talk than the one I'd eventually give at WiUX — I was still finding its shape live. But the reception told me the material worked: classmates said they'd never thought past the curriculum's minimum when it came to screen readers, semantic HTML, or landmark tags; an instructor pointed me toward Chrome's built-in Lighthouse accessibility audit; more than one person admitted they'd been treating accessibility as a nice-to-have. That response — from the people who knew me best in that program — is what gave me the confidence to say yes a few weeks later when Women in UX at the University of Washington invited me to bring an expanded version to their conference.

Reflection

Giving this talk to my own cohort first, before it ever went anywhere public, was its own kind of exposure. These were the people I'd graduate alongside, and I didn't know how a disclosure this personal — foster care, military sexual assault, a service-connected disability — would land in that room. It landed. The validation I got here is what made me brave enough to say yes when WiUX asked me to do a bigger version of it two months later. This is the rehearsal that proved the talk worked before I ever took it to a real stage.