From passion to profession: how UEL shaped my career in accessibility

Just over fifteen years ago, I was putting the finishing touches on my final-year dissertation here at UEL. As a Game Design student, I was exploring alternatives to text captions to convey mood in video games. Little did I know that this project was the first step on my journey towards becoming a digital accessibility professional, or that I would eventually return to UEL to help make our digital experiences more inclusive.

My inspiration was deeply personal: My partner (now my wife) is deaf. The first time I tried to share my love of gaming with her, we were immediately blocked by a tutorial that was simply unplayable. Captions are the bare minimum and, though they are commonplace now, like many accessibility considerations, they are still all too easily overlooked.

Accessibility is for everyone

Today (21 May) is Global Accessibility Awareness Day, a day to focus on how we design digital spaces. For an initiative started 15 years ago, it remains just as important as ever.

You’ve likely heard the statistic that 1 in 5 people in the UK have a disability. That means there is a very high chance you interact with a disabled person every day - whether that’s a classmate, a student, a lecturer, a colleague, a friend - and because not all disabilities are visible, we often don’t recognise the barriers people face.

What’s less obvious is that good accessibility benefits all of us. This is the curb-cut effect: when you design something to solve a barrier for disabled people, it ends up making life better for everyone:

• Captions enable my wife to access a video essay, but they also allow a student commuting on a busy train to watch a lecture recording on silent.
• Plain language makes content more approachable for someone with a cognitive disability, but it also caters to our multicultural community and the stressed student cramming during exam season.
• Alternative text for images ensures they can be accessed by someone using a screen reader, but it also provides a fallback for someone on a weak mobile connection where images won’t load.
• Keyboard-friendly interfaces empower someone using an assistive switch device, while delivering speed and consistency for power users relying on keyboard shortcuts.

Inclusive design challenges us to look past our own experiences and imagine what’s possible for others.

Accessible by design

Digital exclusion is the result of a disconnect between how an experience was designed and the needs of the person using it.

As the Digital Accessibility Specialist in UEL’s web team, my job is to bridge that gap. I collaborate on a daily basis with developers, UX designers, content editors, project managers and marketers to ensure we deliver the best possible user experience for everyone who visits our website.

In practice, this means embedding accessibility in our agile development lifecycle. During sprint cycles, I’m involved in planning, delivering and testing new web features, reviewing and remediating existing content and functionality, and consulting on our marketing campaigns. From ensuring our components work with a keyboard, to validating the structure of our pages, to fixing our documents, no two days are the same.

This collaborative approach started during my degree: I had the opportunity to work with Rix Inclusive Research. a research institute based right here at UEL that empowers people with learning disabilities, mental health concerns and dementia, through digital and learning technologies. Contributing to what would become Rix Wikis - simple, accessible, easy-to-build personal websites - I saw first hand how a co-development approach gives people agency over their own stories. That legacy continues to this day.

It taught me a lesson that still rings true: Accessibility isn’t a feature you add on at the end, it’s fundamental to good design.

Learning to navigate the bleeding edge

What I remember most about my time at UEL is the melting pot of ideas and the opportunities I was exposed to (that, and the time I nearly burned down our student kitchen in Marley House!). I was fortunate that my course allowed me to explore both games design and a traditional writing degree. I was challenged to consider how globalisation, disruptive technologies, and new media were shaping our world; how different lenses could be used to explore unfamiliar concepts.

While I was studying, the first iPhone had just been released, the Unity game engine was changing indie development, and Wordpress was taking over the web. Our lecturers didn’t just teach us technical skills, they taught us to navigate a rapidly changing world.

Today’s digital landscape has radically changed - voice assistants, 3D printing, JavaScript frameworks, generative AI - but the human challenges remain. The skills I developed at UEL are more important than ever. Over the years, I’ve learned that my role in tech is often not to have all the answers, but to create space for the questions that are easily overlooked.

Coming full circle

These days, I’m more likely to play Animal Crossing than the latest Call of Duty, but my passion for accessibility has only deepened.

While I didn’t take the traditional path into the commercial games industry like my peers, my degree was the foundation of my career. It helped to solidify a lot of my thinking and exposed me to opportunities I wouldn’t otherwise have had.

The transferable skills I developed at UEL - empathy, critical thinking, user experience design, project management - are the same tools I use today to build a better world.

To our current and future students, I would encourage you to recognise that your degree is more than the sum of its parts: it will shape you in ways you can’t yet anticipate, and you’ll keep making connections between these ideas long after your studies.

This Global Accessibility Awareness Day, I challenge you to consider how you can bring inclusion into your own projects and future careers. 

What assumptions are we making about how people experience our content? 

What don’t we know and how can we take the time to explore it?

Who’s missing from the conversation?