How to get an accessibility tester job as a blind programmer?

We (Olark YC S09) are in the process of building out a fully accessible platform for realtime communication (live chat, bots/automations) for both agents and visitors, and regularly work with folks to help our team test and improve our work -- it's still early days Progress Not Perfection :).

I am definitely interesting in talking, you can apply as a tester here: https://www.olark.com/ada-accessible-live-chat

And you can ping me personally on Linkedin if you want to chat more. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/bencongleton)

We work with both individuals often as contractors, and agencies as well.

You might want to talk to the folks at lighthouse SF, they do consulting for a lot of tech companies, and have a matching program, I am actually going to be at their offices Thursday, so I can follow up with best way to get in touch, but I'd assume the emails on the below link will get you what you need. https://lighthouse-sf.org/programs/access-technology/

And we've also worked with Fable who manages engagements like what you are looking for: https://makeitfable.com/community/

It sounds like you'd be incredibly useful for the spirit of accessibility, but need to work on your knowledge of the rules of accessibility. When we build accessible applications at our company, we have to comply with every rule of "WCAG AA 2.1" to satisfy our clients.

A professional audit of our product would result in a report of exactly which rules we need to address, along with suggestions for possible changes. I would use this to satisfy the accessibility portion of our contracts. So an accessibility expert is, among other things, a compliance officer who provides credible proof that a company is actively respecting the ADA.

With your skillset, I’d highly recommend starting your own consultancy. There’s likely an incredible demand for you can offer.

I’m also interested in connecting to see if there’s any opportunity with the projects that come my way. I’d love to keep in touch. Cheers!

One blind accessibility tester i had the pleasure working with got his position at a national government agency by sending a complaint about the poor accessibility for blind people on their websites. The response was an invitation to a job interview!

I currently don't have a concrete opportunity for you but maybe something to consider: I occasionally teach at universities, and students often learn about accessibility as a general topic but have zero insight into what it actually means, as in: how a real person with an actual disability is using assistive software. I sometimes show them YouTube videos of people explaining their screen readers. I am sure that universities could be interested in some kind of package, where they bring you on remotely, perhaps, and you can do a live session of reviewing something students designed, or talk to them about things most apps/websites tend to get wrong (are cookie nags extra annoying/complicated to deal with to you, or do you even stand a chance at unclicking some of those tracking options, how about apps without buttons, mostly controlled by gestures, etc.). As a teacher, I didn't know even where to start reaching out to someone (at the time when I wanted to do something about it) who could actually show students how they "see" (or not see) those websites and apps. Again, I think this is something you should most definitely get paid for (it's super valuable), I didn't have the ability to get a budget at the time, but would have had a much easier internal pitch for it if there was someone already offering this as a package deal kind of thing. Like, a 2 hour call before a project, then students work on it, and you come back in for another 2 hours at the end of class / semester to review.

Anyways, I'm rambling on, but I always felt like this is something that would be valuable and also struggled with connecting the right pieces to make it happen.

If you're into web development, too, or maybe even just Notion could work, would be a potential indie project, too — a "hand-crafted job site / market place" of accessibility services / experts."

Contact Jakob at https://sparrowaccess.com/ He's doing exactly that. Helpful guy, maybe he has some tips for you.

You may want to reach out to Dr. Sile O’Modhrain (https://smtd.umich.edu/faculty-profiles/sile-omodhrain/).

She is a highly experienced blind researcher & a co-founder of NewHaptics, a tactile display startup (https://www.newhaptics.com/).

Even if you want to focus on accessibility testing rather than hardware, Dr. O'Modhrain may be able to connect you with useful guidance. I would also mention your programming experience in case NewHaptics is looking for someone to help with testing hardware, firmware, or drivers.

You can try to reach out to Lucas Radaelli https://twitter.com/lucasradaelli for conseling, he is blind and developer at Google and works with accesibility projects.

I worked alongside a blind programmer in one of my past teams and AFAIK the company hired him as a consultant and found him through his work in my country's organization for blind people. I'd highly recommend joining such a group in your area as it seems likely they will be able to get you in touch with companies. If the group is at least somewhat big, chances are they'd have been approached by companies before. (They had been? They'll have been? I am not sure what tense to use. ESL)

Write about your work.

Post it everywhere. LinkedIn, Reddit, your blog.

Start every post saying your looking for work.

Your joke was good, alas my sense of humor is a little rusty.

Hopefully my delivery there sounded good on your end, I have no helpful advice but best of luck!

I would try to target industries where accessibility is a legal requirement, like banking, healthcare, etc. I'm sure there may be more but those are the few that come to mind. I work for a bank and know we have both a large accessibility team and a blind developer (although I don't think he's on that specific team).

You can also connect with https://visionaid.org. They are a non profit who offer accessibility testing. Maybe you'll be able to join their team. We recently tested our product with them.

If I were you, I would position myself as an educator and consultant on the subject.

Most UI developers have picked up tidbits here and there about accessibility. You can get pretty far by honoring semantic html and you learn other things through reading, receiving code feedback etc.

But I don't know anybody who tests their code rigorously using the same tools that an actual blind person would use. I understand sighted workflows, but not blind ones. We strive for 100% accessibility but everybody only knows what they know.

I think that you could very easily establish yourself as the a11y guy and make money through several routes including

- auditing websites for a11y - training staff - offering paid online content / courses - independently auditing websites and using your results to sell them in fixing it or training staff

Obviously the trick of this is that you have to have some kind of track record as the a11y guy. Let me tell you I would read the heck out of a blog written by a blind developer talking about good and bad websites that he has to interact with. I would absolutely watch YouTube videos about it. And if you reached out to a business and told them "hey, your website is unusable for blind people, but I can help fix it for $___", I think that many of them would take it seriously.

Try to look for jobs in edtech. To be able to use a software in a US classroom its a hard requirement to be accessible, so edtech companies are always on the lookout for a11y engineers.

Can you tell me more about your setup for navigation and coding on Windows, I'm interested because I need to help someone who lost his sight learn keyboard typing and coding

When I've done frontend work for government agencies, we have contacted the national association for blind people in my country, and gotten help from them (Norges Blindeforbund / The Norwegian Association of the Blind and Partially Sighted). Could you perhaps reach out to a similar organization where you live and tell them of your services, so that when others reach out to that organization for help they can refer them to you?

Hi there, I'm a blind accessibility specialist and now a senior native mobile accessibility coach with Deque. Knowing how to use the assistive technology is one thing, but you'll need to know WCAG and the applicable criteria for native apps if you want to start testing. I highly recommend you check out https://dequeuniversity.com in order to gain functional and in-depth knowledge of the ADA WCAG, Section 508 standards, and international accessibility standards. I learned my tech skills at the Lighthouse in SF years ago after I suddenly went blind in 2014, so they are a good resource for learning skills and getting connected with focus and research studies for local tech companies, but definitely go through Deque University as a priority.

As far as I know, there are special agencies that help companies or government agencies with their accessibility goals. I assume they have a more diverse set of employees and would be open to hire you.

When I looked into hiring someone for a company directly, I was told that because of HIPAA laws you cannot advertise „we want to hire blind programmer“.

Have you tried working freelance? I've had several big projects in the past where we've had accessibility requirements to meet and it always involves training testers and developers in the tools. I'd have happily paid a someone to consult on best approaches, run the tests, maybe train a few people to keep it going.

I been working on Hacker News mobile app for a while now, it would be awesome if you can offer some suggestions on accessibility of the app.

https://github.com/Livinglist/Hacki

Check out Level Access in Vienna Virginia (https://www.levelaccess.com/contact/)

A few years ago I worked for this company as an Accessibility Analyst alongside many blind programmers who provided expert perspectives on the websites and apps the company was contracted to remediate. It sounds like what you are looking for. Last I knew, they had multiple office locations and some remote contractors. They would probably be delighted to work out a remote/hybrid arrangement. Good luck!

I wish my best of luck to you to land on a job sooner. I have prepared a sheet for anyone to add a job if you have an opportunity for differently abled people. I hope this can help more differently abled people to find jobs. Link: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/147BBCEAlTqnSvdm4V1H4... Good luck.

Just caught this after a friend send it through, if you or anyone else is interested, please reach out to me at: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tony-p-le-20454736/

I started in education then migrated to tech with accessibility testing and now currently work as an accessibility analyst at Google. Would love to connect.

I develop a FOSS project that prioritizes accessibility, and I haven't had any screenreader testing in a hot minute. I would appreciate even a little bit of testing.

How can one contact you?

Do you have any contact info? If you're available for freelance work, I'll note down your contact, since we plan to do accessibility testing in the future :)

Maybe one of the crowd testing platforms? what you offer, accessibility testing for vision impaired people, is important and (should be) done in every company for every product an iteration but in reality it is quite rare. A company don't test accessibility for every small change and release, so you'll need to either find a team with a lot of products or offer your services to different clients.

TBH, if they're not, all major websites should be looking to contract with you. I would maybe try hitting up the major agencies if you're looking for fulltime work, they have lots of clients and probably get requests for accessibility often. I think you could also get work just by being a prolific advocate for accessible web.

Check out Fable: https://makeitfable.com/

In addition to all the recommendations here, if you're not already a member you might be interested in joining the Program-l listserv: https://www.freelists.org/list/program-l

> I regularly use pretty much all screen readers except Orca, I use VoiceOver for anything Apple makes, JAWS or NVDA anything Windows, and Talkback in Android.

I know a blind person who apparently never heard about anything of these. Do you know some good intros?

From a practical point, won't it be hard to know if the app is working if you can't see e.g. a field that the reader skips?

It might be outweighted by that you are good with the tools though.

My company does tons of accessibility testing, and I imagine that someone who can code too would be a big benefit. I’d be happy to talk in dms, I can get you to the right people.

I am currently working alongside blind/vision impaired persons that are auditing/coding web sites for accessibility. Do you live in Belgium by any chance ?

Banks, they are required to implement accessibility and they have hiring policies to hire some disabled, and you could be a big asset in testing these

Check out A360, it's a firm we worked with for accessibility testing our sites and they hire people who are partially sighted or blind

Accessibility is incredibly important and unfortunately it is often treated as a nice to have addition to products.

Most MVPs do not consider accessibility.

Hey! Would you mind reaching out to me via Twitter @matisseverduyn? Thanks!

Posting on HackerNews is a very good start! (:

Hopefully one the comments yields to an offer.

I have two leads for you. DM me for details.