I’m delighted to speak at Devoxx UK again after my first time last year! I enjoyed visiting the UK, attending many great talks, and meeting many amazing speakers. The conference runs from May 7 to May 9 at the Business Design Center in London (Islington). If you’re there, please come, find me, and say hello—I’d love to meet you!!
Inspiration for the talk
A museum visit sparked the idea
After my hearing loss accessibility talk, I wanted to give a different, more technical talk about accessibility. I’ve been thinking about it for about two years, but wasn’t sure how to approach it best. Then, the answer came in an unexpected place – a museum. After speaking at Build Stuff 2023 in Vilnius, Lithuania, I stayed an extra week after the conference to explore the Baltic countries.
At the museum, I noticed three things that apply to accessibility:
- Museums have a clear goal – to teach visitors about the subject their exhibitions are about
- They have a how – the way they present information
- Most importantly, they have a why – reasons for displaying items in certain ways
Good museums think about how visitors will move through spaces and what helps them navigate easily.
As humans, we should question everything. It’s not just about following what’s technically possible when showing things – it’s about understanding how your customers will explore the museum and what will help them find their way easily. We need to look beyond what works and think about what works for our users.
How this applies to my talk
We should question why we make each accessibility choice. We need to make sure our work truly helps users, and we need to go beyond checklists to focus on real impact. This is what Empathy-Driven Development (EDD) is about – changing our thinking from “What must we do?” to “Why does it matter, and how can we do it well?”
The best accessibility comes from mixing technical skills with real-life experience. When we code with empathy, we don’t just build accessible features; we create experiences that respect everyone.
My previous talk, Hear! Hear! An accessibility tale from a hearing-impaired Senior Software Engineer, shared what life is like with a 55% hearing loss and how to make your Webs better for such users. The new talk goes further by looking at accessibility from both a developer’s and a user’s view. While I’ll build on concepts from my hearing loss talk, I want to dive deeper into the technical aspects of creating accessible experiences for all users.
Beyond compliance: The human side of accessibility
One important point about my talk: expect to be surprised by some facts. My goal is to show how to think from different perspectives and understand the challenges people with disabilities face when using websites. Only 3% of the internet is fully accessible, yet over 1 billion people worldwide have some disability, making this topic critical to share.
During my talk, we’ll explore several key areas of accessibility. Here’s a little preview of some concepts we’ll cover.
Different disabilities
Did you know that everyone experiences disability at some point, sometimes even every day? We all face temporary and situational disabilities such as:
- Using a phone in bright sunlight (vision)
- Trying to watch a video in a noisy place (hearing)
- Using a device one-handed while holding a child (mobility)
- Recovering from surgery or injury
- And many more…
But do we really know how our users actually use our products? Many people don’t tell us when they struggle. Why?
Research shows that people with disabilities often create their own “fixes” for websites that are hard to use. They find workarounds that developers never see. This makes problems invisible to us.
What’s worse, people get tired of always having to explain their needs. Experts call this “disclosure fatigue” or “explaining fatigue” – the mental and emotional effort of constantly telling others about your disability. After a while, many users just give up and leave your website instead of speaking up again.
This is why getting an honest feedback about accessibility is so challenging. During my talk, I’ll share how this happens from my own experience with hearing loss.
Legal requirements for Web accessibility
Accessibility laws are getting stronger worldwide with serious penalties for websites that don’t comply. The European Accessibility Act takes effect in June 2025, requiring more websites to be accessible. The USA has the Americans with Disability Act (ADA), which courts now apply to websites. The UK has The Equality Act 2010, which also covers websites.
Accessibility is becoming a legal requirement globally, so it’s important to build it into your websites. What many teams don’t realize is that lawsuits mostly target websites with partial accessibility rather than none at all. This happens because it shows the company knew about accessibility requirements but chose not to fully implement them. There’s no middle ground – either make your site fully accessible or you risk legal problems.
People with disabilities control $13 trillion in global spending—a market larger than China’s and still growing.
How should we look at accessibility?
Is following WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) and meeting compliance levels A, AA, or AAA enough? Research from WebAIM has found that 94.8% of the top one million websites had detectable WCAG 2.0 failures, showing that accessibility issues are nearly universal online.
We need to see our applications through different eyes – making accessibility about people, not rules. It’s about changing our perspective. When we design with real human experiences in mind (and not just checking boxes), we create products that truly work for everyone, including the 16% of people worldwide with disabilities. When we empathize with diverse user needs and build in accessibility from the start, we often create better products for all users, not just the ones with a disability.
How important is human input? How much automation or AI can help?
There are many good automated tools that can test for accessibility. They apply rules consistently and follow WCAG criteria, which helps with compliance. But these tools typically catch only about 30% of accessibility issues — despite that, they are still a good start at ensuring accessibility.
AI can be helpful for accessibility testing because it can potentially understand content meaning and learn over time, but it’s not a perfect solution. We must remember that AI:
- Can give different results between tests or after updates, which isn’t really reliable
- Can create false confidence since sophisticated AI tools might make you think you’ve caught all issues when you haven’t
Today, human input and empathy remain essential – nothing replaces direct feedback, especially from someone with a real-life experience of having a disability, like hearing loss. Automated tools can’t measure the emotional impact, frustration levels, and overall usability for people with disabilities. While human testing has its limits too, the creative solutions people develop are incredibly valuable.
To sum up
I’m simply a developer with 55% hearing loss in both ears who wants to use my experience to advocate and help improve accessibility. I hope to see you at my session on Friday, May 9th from 09:00-09:50 in Room B at Devoxx UK!
If you can’t attend, don’t worry – a recording will be available soon after, and we will post it here once it’s available. 😊 Let’s work together to build a more inclusive digital world!
