2026-04-26
I didn't grow up thinking about accessibility but I did come up through a world that wasn't built for people like me. It wasn't until I started working closely with open source communities, with contributors from dozens of countries, different abilities, different backgrounds, that I began to understand how much of what we build assumes a very specific kind of person on the other end.
Accessibility isn't a feature. That's the first thing I want to say plainly. It's not a checkbox on a design review or a ticket in the backlog that gets deprioritised when deadlines tighten. It's a fundamental question about who your product is for. When you design something that only works for people without visual impairments, or people who speak fluent English, or people with a fast internet connection and a modern device, you haven't built something universal – you've built something exclusive and called it a default.
At GitLab, I saw what it looked like when a company genuinely tried to build for everyone. Remote-first work meant that people who had historically been shut out of tech jobs – people with disabilities, people with caregiving responsibilities, people in parts of the world that Silicon Valley had never considered – could contribute meaningfully. It wasn't perfect, but the intention was real, and the intention shaped the culture. I carry that with me.
Inclusion goes hand in hand with this. You can make a product technically accessible and still make people feel unwelcome. Inclusion is about whether someone sees themselves in your team, your documentation, your marketing, your community. It's about whether the people building the thing reflect the diversity of the people using it. As someone who is part of the LGBTQ+ community, I know what it feels like to look around a room and wonder whether you belong there. That feeling is information. It means something went wrong upstream.
I care about this because I've seen what happens when you get it right. When the door is genuinely open – not performatively, not as a PR exercise, but structurally and intentionally – the work gets better. The perspectives in the room expand. The blind spots shrink. Building inclusively isn't a constraint on good design; it is good design. And if you're not thinking about it, you're not thinking about all your users. You're just thinking about some of them. To be honest, you're probably only thinking about yourself.