Expand Your Horizons: Charting Your Coding Compliance Career Path and Beyond

Many of you might know me from my long journey in web design and development since the mid-90s. I’ve spent years writing articles, authoring books, and speaking at conferences about web development, progressive enhancement, and, most importantly for our discussion today, accessibility. Actually, this marks my 150th talk, a milestone reflecting years dedicated to this field. My background includes leading the Web Standards Project and editing A List Apart, deeply embedding me in the web dev community, especially within accessibility.

But today’s focus isn’t just on my journey. It’s about yours. About nine months ago, I shifted my focus, leveraging my accessibility skills in new directions by joining Microsoft’s Accessibility Innovation team, leading investments in the AI for Accessibility grant program. However, my aim here isn’t AI; it’s to explore how you can amplify your accessibility expertise beyond the typical realm of identifying and fixing compliance bugs and to think about your Coding Compliance Career Path.

The Accessibility Career Paradox: Breaking Free from the Code Compliance Box

There’s a stark irony in the career trajectory of accessibility-focused developers. We dedicate ourselves to dismantling barriers for users, yet often find ourselves confined by career limitations. It’s easy to become typecast as just the “accessibility person,” pigeonholed into roles solely defined by code compliance.

Organizations often underutilize the breadth of skills accessibility professionals possess, seeing our value primarily in ticking compliance boxes and mitigating legal risks. Career advancement can feel restricted, often topping out at senior or principal roles unless one pivots entirely into people management—a different skillset altogether. What if your ambition lies in deepening your technical expertise and expanding your impact as an individual contributor within a coding compliance career path, but beyond the code itself?

This organizational narrow-mindedness hinders both personal growth and the potential for broader organizational impact. While compliance work is undeniably vital and deeply impactful for users, many of us experience the frustrations of being boxed in as “accessibility devs.” Perhaps you recognize some of these challenges:

Feeling misunderstood or undervalued by colleagues.
Overwhelming workload demanding multiple people to manage effectively.
Resistance from teams to integrate accessibility into their workflows.
Frustratingly slow progress, sometimes feeling like steps backward.
Isolation within teams or the company as the sole accessibility advocate.

Again, let me reiterate: code compliance is crucial and not to be diminished. My goal isn’t to discourage this essential work, but to elevate your perspective and illuminate the vast potential of your skills.

Beyond Compliance: Unlocking Your Wider Potential in a Coding Compliance Career Path

You, as developers passionate about accessibility, bring immense value to your organizations, users, and the tech industry at large. This talk is about recognizing and seizing those opportunities, expanding your coding compliance career path beyond the expected boundaries.

It’s about opportunity!

In my years in this field, I’ve navigated the same challenges of career growth. However, I’ve discovered numerous avenues for leveraging our accessibility expertise across web development and the broader tech landscape. My career, spanning various roles from educator and publisher to W3C spec editor, Developer Relations, and strategic positions, has shown me the myriad ways your skills are invaluable.

Today, I want to share five key areas where your accessibility expertise can shine, potentially reshaping your coding compliance career path:

Design Systems
Product Design
Data Science
AI Research & Ethics
Diversity & Inclusion

These are not exhaustive, and if you find fulfillment in your current role, that’s perfectly valid. My aim is to broaden your awareness of the diverse roles where your accessibility skills are not just needed, but transformative—roles you might not have previously considered as part of a coding compliance career path.

Crucially, I am not suggesting you take on additional responsibilities without appropriate recognition and compensation. Organizations must avoid the trap of expecting accessibility experts to extend their roles without acknowledging the added value. This leads to burnout and undervalues your specialized skills within a coding compliance career path.

Design Systems & Strategies: Codifying Accessibility Best Practices into Your Coding Compliance Career Path

For those deeply rooted in software development, design systems offer a compelling avenue to stay technical while significantly broadening your impact within a coding compliance career path.

Design systems, and their component libraries, standardize design and coding guidelines within an organization. They ensure consistency across products and enhance team efficiency by providing reusable components, eliminating the need to build every interface from scratch. An accessible design system inherently reduces accessibility bugs in new interfaces. Furthermore, addressing an accessibility issue within the system automatically resolves it across all products utilizing that component—though, admittedly, implementation isn’t always seamless.

In smaller organizations without established design systems, your accessibility expertise becomes even more valuable. You can champion the creation of a design system, positioning yourself as the ideal candidate to lead its development and ongoing maintenance, directly shaping the coding compliance career path within your company.

In a design systems role, you can:

Collaborate directly with engineers to develop accessible system components.
Conduct regular audits of the system for compliance, especially focusing on component combinations that might introduce issues.
Deliver in-house accessibility training to designers and engineers, enhancing their skills and integrating accessibility into the development lifecycle.
Provide training and guidance on design system implementation to project teams and new hires, embedding accessibility knowledge across the organization.
Celebrate team successes in utilizing the design system, especially highlighting accessibility wins through various communication channels, boosting morale and reinforcing best practices within the coding compliance career path.

In larger organizations with existing design systems, your approach can be more strategic and impactful for your coding compliance career path:

Become the central accessibility advocate within the design system team and across all software development practices, ensuring accessibility is a core consideration.
Act as a liaison between senior management and product owners, ensuring accessibility is prioritized and integrated into product roadmaps, advocating for necessary resources to achieve accessibility goals and address resource limitations often faced in coding compliance career path development.
Develop organizational guidelines and structures to ensure accessibility goals are consistently met across all projects.
Educate and mentor colleagues across departments on accessibility best practices, fostering a culture of inclusivity.
Publicly recognize and celebrate all accessibility achievements, no matter how small. Public acknowledgment significantly boosts morale, especially given the challenges often encountered in accessibility-focused roles, reinforcing the value of a coding compliance career path.

As an accessibility-focused developer, your unique skills are crucial in building alignment on accessibility across teams, improving morale, and accelerating development by reducing accessibility-related bugs, making design systems a powerful avenue in your coding compliance career path.

Product Design: Shaping Inclusive Products and Elevating Your Coding Compliance Career Path

Moving beyond pure code, product design offers a strategic role to shape the very products we build, expanding your influence within a coding compliance career path. Whether as a product designer, owner, or manager, you can embed accessibility from the outset.

This role embodies the “shift left” philosophy we advocate for in accessibility. It involves:

Integrating with feature teams to deeply understand their motivations and goals. Framing accessibility recommendations within their vision ensures better reception and adoption. Early integration also allows for preemptive identification and elimination of potential accessibility barriers, educating teams to avoid future issues, and embedding accessibility into their workflow as a natural part of their coding compliance career path.
Proactively asking questions and offering to upskill teams, empowering them to build products accessible to a broader customer base, thus expanding their skillset and contributing to their coding compliance career path.
Ensuring the inclusion (and fair compensation) of people with disabilities in all stages of research, co-creation, and testing. This direct engagement provides invaluable insights into user needs, directly influencing product development and enhancing the coding compliance career path by grounding it in real user experiences.

This proactive approach yields significant business advantages:

Substantial time savings for engineering and QA teams, translating directly to cost savings.
Reduced legal risks associated with non-compliance, further saving on legal fees and potential settlements.
Creation of products that are inherently better for a larger user base, leading to increased customer satisfaction and reduced churn.
Unlocking new revenue streams by expanding the addressable market to include more users, demonstrating the business impact of a robust coding compliance career path.

WhatsApp’s success story perfectly illustrates this point. In a market saturated with nearly 8,000 chat apps at its launch, WhatsApp distinguished itself by supporting operating systems often overlooked: older Android versions, Blackberry, Symbian, Nokia Series 40, and Windows Phone—some not even smartphones. This broadened accessibility, in the wider sense of platform access, dramatically expanded their user base. When Facebook acquired WhatsApp for $19 billion, it boasted over 600 million users globally, a testament to the power of accessible design, broadly defined.

By applying the same principle of broad accessibility—not just in code compliance, but in user reach—we can expand our customer base and outperform competitors. Product design, therefore, becomes a pivotal role in a coding compliance career path, moving beyond reactive bug fixing to proactive, inclusive product creation.

As an accessibility-focused developer in product design, your unique perspective ensures higher quality products, fewer bugs, and greater cost-efficiency for your company, significantly elevating the strategic value of a coding compliance career path.

Data Science: Measuring What Truly Matters in Your Coding Compliance Career Path

Venturing further into related fields, data science presents a compelling avenue to leverage your accessibility expertise, redefining metrics and measures within a coding compliance career path. As part of a data science team, you can advocate for the inclusion of accessibility in product metrics by:

Ensuring key business metrics incorporate data from users with disabilities, providing a more holistic view of product performance and user satisfaction.
Introducing new product metrics specifically designed to reflect the experiences of diverse disability communities, offering granular insights into accessibility performance beyond basic compliance.
Measuring the time users with assistive technologies (AT) require to complete key tasks, tracking improvements and regressions over time. This provides quantifiable data on the real-world usability of products and the effectiveness of accessibility efforts, adding a data-driven dimension to your coding compliance career path.

Beyond product metrics, your impact extends to internal processes, particularly in how compliance work is tracked and evaluated within a coding compliance career path:

Implementing systems to capture automated testing results and track compliance progress over time, providing a clear, data-backed view of compliance status.
Developing dashboards to highlight accessibility bug activity, tracking:
- Number of new bugs reported.
- Number of bugs remediated.
- Number of outstanding bugs.
- Number of bugs marked as “won’t fix.”
- Average age of unresolved bugs.
Integrating this accessibility data into top-level product reports, ensuring accessibility is visible and considered at all management levels, thus embedding it into the core business narrative of a coding compliance career path.

Furthermore, you can apply your accessibility skills to enhance the tools used internally, improving efficiency and inclusivity within a coding compliance career path:

Ensuring all data analysis tools are fully accessible to all employees, promoting inclusivity and enabling all team members to contribute effectively.
Guaranteeing charts and visualizations are accessible, making data insights available to everyone, regardless of visual abilities.
Providing access to raw data tables as an alternative to visual representations, catering to users who prefer or require non-visual data access.
Enabling API access to data, empowering colleagues to create custom tools tailored to their specific needs and accessibility requirements, fostering innovation and personalized workflows within a coding compliance career path.

This often-overlooked area of internal tool accessibility is critical for creating a truly inclusive workplace and maximizing the effectiveness of accessibility professionals within their coding compliance career path.

As an accessibility-focused developer in data science, your unique perspective can guide your company to make data-driven decisions that result in more inclusive and accessible products, leading to improved user experiences and potentially increased revenue, thereby broadening the strategic importance of a coding compliance career path.

AI Research & Ethics: Safeguarding Inclusivity in the Age of Machines and Your Coding Compliance Career Path

The rapidly evolving field of AI research and ethics urgently needs your expertise to ensure technology serves all of humanity, making it a crucial frontier in your coding compliance career path. AI holds immense potential to improve lives, including those of people with disabilities, but realizing this potential requires proactive ethical considerations and accessibility expertise.

Your knowledge and connections in the accessibility space are vital to harnessing AI’s power for good, specifically for people with disabilities, shaping a responsible and ethical coding compliance career path.

As part of an AI research team, you can:

Observe and analyze how people with disabilities interact with the world, identifying opportunities for AI to:
- Enhance their independence and autonomy.
- Simplify complex tasks, making actions more intuitive and efficient.
- Enrich their overall experiences and engagement with the world.
Co-design AI solutions directly with individuals from diverse disability communities, ensuring solutions are user-centered and truly address their needs. Crucially, avoid assumptions of homogeneity within disability communities, recognizing the diverse needs and preferences within each group, ensuring a nuanced and ethical coding compliance career path.

My current role at Microsoft’s Accessibility Innovation team places me directly in this exciting space, funding projects that leverage AI to improve the lives of people with disabilities, demonstrating the impactful evolution of a coding compliance career path.

For example, the ORBIT project addresses the limitations of object detection AI, which often focuses on “perfect” images, failing to account for real-world imperfections. For visually impaired users, capturing perfectly framed and focused images is challenging. ORBIT, from City University of London, pioneered “few-shot learning” by training AI models on brief, imperfect videos captured by blind and low-vision individuals. These videos, with their blurriness and imperfect framing, actually enhance the model’s robustness, enabling object recognition in less-than-ideal contexts. This improves AI quality for everyone, showcasing the broader benefits of inclusive AI development and a forward-thinking coding compliance career path.

Mentra exemplifies another impactful AI application, using AI to connect neurodivergent individuals with employers who value their unique strengths. Mentra’s platform gathers holistic data on job seekers, including cognitive strengths, aptitudes, environmental sensitivities, and necessary accommodations. This data informs AI-driven job matching, connecting individuals with suitable roles based on comprehensive profiles.

Mentra actively avoids biased screening, using a “reverse job fair” model where applicants create a single profile, and AI recommends them for fitting jobs. Employers then express interest and invite candidates to interview, reducing applicant stress and promoting a more equitable hiring process. Mentra’s transparent approach minimizes the need for “covering” in new roles, as accommodation needs are clear from the outset, fostering inclusive workplaces and demonstrating the ethical application of AI within a coding compliance career path.

iWill, working in the mental health space in India, highlights the potential of AI to address critical societal needs. Faced with a severe shortage of mental health professionals in India, iWill is developing cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) chatbots. Unlike most English-centric CBT chatbots, iWill is training a model end-to-end in Hindi. This avoids translation-related biases and ensures cultural relevance, demonstrating the ethical and culturally sensitive application of AI in mental health, and opening new avenues in a socially conscious coding compliance career path.

While AI offers immense benefits, it also carries the risk of perpetuating or exacerbating societal biases and exclusion. AI teams urgently need your expertise to mitigate bias and ensure inclusivity for people with disabilities. Protecting user privacy is equally critical in AI development.

Your contributions to AI teams are invaluable:

Identifying and mitigating bias (or potential bias) in AI datasets, ensuring fairness and equity in AI systems.
Promoting the representation of people with disabilities in datasets, ensuring AI is trained on diverse and inclusive data.
Safeguarding people with disabilities from exploitation through datasets, upholding ethical data practices.
Ensuring all interfaces to AI tools are fully accessible, making AI technology usable by everyone.
Guaranteeing the products created by AI are inherently accessible, embedding accessibility into the core output of AI systems.
Validating that AI products are not inherently biased or exclusionary and cannot be used to perpetuate bias or exclusion, ensuring responsible and ethical AI deployment, and defining a morally grounded coding compliance career path.

As an accessibility-focused developer in AI research and ethics, your unique perspective is crucial to ensuring AI advancements are beneficial and not harmful to people with disabilities, shaping a future where technology empowers all, and solidifying a vital and ethical coding compliance career path.

Diversity & Inclusion: Building Inclusive Teams and Cultures for a Stronger Coding Compliance Career Path

Diversity and Inclusion (D&I) roles, while seemingly furthest from traditional development, wield profound influence on teams and organizational culture, making them a powerful, though less conventional, avenue within a coding compliance career path. The benefits of diverse teams are well-documented, but let’s briefly reiterate why diversity is paramount:

Diverse teams bring a wealth of varied perspectives and lived experiences, enriching problem-solving and innovation.
This diverse knowledge base facilitates early identification of potential barriers and opportunities within projects, leading to more inclusive and effective outcomes.
Diverse teams are more likely to demonstrate empathy towards all users, including those with disabilities, leading to more user-centric and accessible products.
Diverse teams are demonstrably more innovative, driving creativity and pushing boundaries.
Diverse teams make better, more informed decisions, leading to improved business outcomes.

For deeper insights into the innovation and decision-making advantages of diverse teams, research from the Harvard Business Review provides compelling evidence.

Your deep understanding of inclusive product development positions you perfectly to champion diversity within your organization’s recruiting efforts, addressing systemic issues and strengthening the foundation of your coding compliance career path through inclusive practices.

This starts with asking critical questions about existing practices:

Does our company have a clearly defined disability hiring policy?
Are our recruiters actively “screening in” people with disabilities, focusing on potential rather than perceived limitations?
Where are we advertising job openings? Are these channels effectively reaching people with disabilities?
Is the language used in our job postings inclusive, or does it inadvertently exclude certain groups?
Is our interview process inherently inclusive and accommodating to the diverse needs of candidates with disabilities?

Actively seeking out and recruiting disabled talent is crucial for building truly diverse teams.

While pipeline initiatives are important, retention is equally critical. A welcoming and supportive environment is paramount for retaining diverse talent. Employee churn is costly, and diverse talent will seek environments where they are valued and respected, highlighting the importance of inclusive cultures in sustaining a robust coding compliance career path.

To retain diverse talent, ensure teams genuinely recognize and value the contributions of all members. This is where D&I training and coaching becomes essential.

Influence team culture by framing diversity within the context of business goals and organizational success:

Highlight how a lack of diversity creates knowledge gaps, hindering innovation and problem-solving.
Emphasize that diverse hiring directly addresses these gaps, bringing in crucial perspectives and skills.
Clearly articulate the inherent value of diverse colleagues’ knowledge and lived experiences, demonstrating their contributions to organizational success and strengthening the coding compliance career path through inclusive growth.

Once this value proposition is established, proactively address non-inclusive or biased behaviors. Lead with curiosity, seeking to understand the root of behaviors before judgment. This approach can diffuse tense situations and facilitate learning and perspective shifts regarding privilege and bias. While some individuals may be resistant to change, non-confrontational conversations can often be surprisingly effective in fostering understanding and promoting inclusivity, contributing to a more welcoming coding compliance career path for all.

Further retention strategies include evaluating team processes and environments for inclusiveness. Are hybrid meetings dominated by in-person participants, marginalizing remote colleagues? Are team events scheduled at times or locations that exclude parents, caregivers, or individuals with specific needs? Are events held in inaccessible venues or environments? Addressing these practical aspects of team culture is crucial for creating a truly inclusive workplace and a sustainable coding compliance career path.

Normalizing disability in everyday interactions is also vital. Individuals in positions of privilege can create space for others to openly acknowledge their disabilities, fostering a more inclusive and accepting environment, and further solidifying a supportive coding compliance career path.

My previous role allowed me to dedicate a significant portion of my responsibilities to D&I, leading trainings and events company-wide, demonstrating the organizational value placed on D&I. Many companies have dedicated D&I teams, but their success often relies on advocacy from across the organization. Even outside formal D&I roles, you can significantly contribute to these efforts.

Lack of career advancement opportunities is a major driver of attrition for diverse talent. Just as feeling undervalued leads to employee departures, unequal career growth opportunities undermine diversity efforts. You can address this by:

Writing strong recommendations for colleagues, prioritizing those from underrepresented groups to highlight their value and potential.
Monitoring promotion patterns and questioning management if diverse representation is lacking, holding leadership accountable for equitable advancement.
Mentoring and reverse-mentoring colleagues, actively supporting the career growth of individuals with disabilities, and investing in a more equitable coding compliance career path ecosystem.

Advocacy from individuals in privileged positions carries significant weight. Use your privilege as a currency to support your colleagues and promote equity within your coding compliance career path sphere.

In formal D&I roles, you can shape company policies and training programs:

Suggesting revisions to existing policies to enhance inclusivity and accessibility.
Drafting new policies to address gaps in D&I and accessibility.
Recommending freely available accessibility and D&I training resources to colleagues, promoting widespread learning and awareness.
Creating and co-creating tailored workshops and training programs for your company or team, addressing specific needs and challenges.
Advocating for mandatory accessibility and D&I training, especially for people managers, equipping leadership with the tools and knowledge to foster inclusive teams and support a diverse coding compliance career path.
Championing diverse representation and inclusive behavior modeling in all in-house training materials, embedding D&I principles into the organizational culture and strengthening the coding compliance career path framework.

As an accessibility-focused developer in D&I, your unique perspective is transformative in building a more inclusive company culture, leading to more inclusive products and services, and ultimately creating a more equitable and enriching coding compliance career path for everyone.

Beyond These Five: Your Value is Immense in Your Coding Compliance Career Path

We’ve explored five areas where your accessibility skills are desperately needed: Design Systems, Product Design, Data Science, AI Research & Ethics, and Diversity & Inclusion. However, these are just a starting point. Countless other opportunities exist.

If you feel constrained in your current role, I hope this discussion has opened your eyes to the vast potential within your reach and the exciting possibilities for your coding compliance career path. If you take away only one message from this session, let it be this:

You are more valuable than you realize.

You are a change maker.

Thank you.