Kit, Accessibility Specialist

Hail and well met! I’m Katriel (also known as Kit).

I can grant you (an) advantage!

I can grant you an advantage. Sustained advantage, even – by reducing risk and and making sure you’re not leaving anyone out in the cold before they even get to your door.

My specialty is in UX, accessibility, and digital inclusion. I have worked approximately since 2016 full-time in doing accessibility-related audits, revisions, remediation, and integration, using the WCAG industry standards as well as related standards, such as for electronic documents, ebooks, and I have experience in government standards such as the US Section 508 and the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Are you leaving people behind?

That is the estimated percentage of people in the US with some form of disability or condition that impacts their daily lives.

Some disabilities and impairments might not even be ‘counted’ as disabilities due to normalization, avoiding stigma, or other reasons; for example, according to the Vision Council more than 80% of adults report using some kind of vision correction (contacts, glasses, reading glasses, etc). We also live in a world still reeling from the impact of Covid-19, with more awareness of chronic pain conditions growing year to year, and dealing with multigenerational hobbies like tabletop gaming and video games.

Are you leaving players out in the cold, before they even get to the table?

Are you assuming your experience is the only one that matters?

Humans have a lot of diverse needs. Some of us are shorter and have issues of reach, mobility, and proportion, like Tolkien’s famous hobbits. Some of us have poor eyesight or are simply looking at this page with 30 other browser tabs open. In fact, it is often MORE valuable to design for distraction simply because the ideal or ‘happy path’ is more and more rare. Designing for impairments, whether it is holding groceries or a baby in one hand and trying to confirm an appointment over the phone in the other, is important for your users – whether or not they identify as having a disability. It can be a situation like working on a train commute and Internet is spotty, if Wi-Fi exists at all; it can be a situation like an arthritis or migraine flare; chronic conditions or neurodivergence: accessibility helps all of these situations, all of these people.

Who is not there with you? And what are you missing out on as a result?

Epic adventures often do better when there are different specialties (classes, subclasses), different ancestries, different perspectives. Are you creating obstacles for your team by drifting in a sea of sameness? Are you leaving people behind even before you put up a shop sign?