I started doing accessibility at GitHub when it had a flat structure (2013) and no one was telling me what to do. In my free time I will just browse the issue backlog and find things I could do. Eventually, I found that there are tons of accessibility issues that are just stale, and a lot of them were just like: this icon button isn’t labeled. I looked at them and thought oh that’s easy. I will fix it.
At one point I added so many aria-labels that AT users got mad that they’re getting misused.
Yes that was me. I am very sorry. I had no idea what I was doing. But then I learned the error of my ways and tried to be better.
Then I pushed for tooltips to be aria-label based, cause nothing that has text in them should need a tooltip. They should be clear, or they need an aria-describedby. But obviously not everyone knows the intricacies, like I didn’t, and they were misused.
Anyways I made a lot of mistakes along the way and I am sorry but I tried and I hope that counted for something.
@tink and @scottohara were two biggest positive influences for me when I was alone in the company doing accessibility without any resources. They gave me feedback without judgement. My manager even asked me to stop cause it wasn’t mine or anyone’s job. Until the MSFT acquisition. I was asked to rep GitHub Accessibility team (something I did voluntarily on top of my job) to triage the audit. I got to work with sinabraham and @jscholes and learned a lot more.
Anyways I was very lucky. But an unsupported accessibility position is an extremely terrible place to be and I wish that fate on no one. But I also think it is near impossible to talk decision makers into thinking accessibility is important.
So the most healthy thing is to work with people who already care. And I will continue to criticize *industry leaders*, *programming rock stars*, and *design leaders* who happily take that title with little to no understanding of accessibility. The end.
@muan It is. I know you managed it (with grace and dedication), but it still happens too often. It's one of the reasons I like this post by Henny Swan from @TetraLogical@indieweb.social so much:
https://tetralogical.com/blog/2023/06/05/the-only-accessibility-specialist-in-the-room/
@muan Your presence is still felt here when you actually go looking for the good work—the things I do here are standing on the shoulders of giants.
I also know that I'd be gone from here in a heartbeat if the mandate from up high went away.
