I find myself most recently the engineering manager for accessibility at GitHub – an honor and immensely fulfilling to make improvements big and small for all of our users now and in the future. This isn’t an exhaustive post or a tutorial but rather some things I keep thinking about as we both use and work on AI tools.

Accessible interfaces 🤝 LLM context

Working on the accessibility of a product often involves a push-and-pull between prioritizing compliance and focusing on experiences. We need both but can’t always tackle both at the same time. One strong case for the compliance side is that it’s often about structure and semantics, things that are measurable and detectable in a more objective way. If you think about it, assistive technologies are programmatic consumption of rendered pages. What else does programmatic consumption of rendered pages? LLMs! If compliance alone wasn’t enough of a reason to prioritize that work, consider the additional benefit to anything doing programmatic understanding of your product and/or content.

Enabling even more users

With greater programmatic usability comes more ability to use whatever tools suit you to help navigate and use an interface, whether that’s chat or automations or otherwise. How many people have ideas that never come to be realized because they cannot access what they need to bring them to life? On this topic I’ll share a video that brought me to literal tears.

Accessible by default

I’ve heard it said that where we are with AI is the worst it’ll ever be, and I think that’s true. We will continue to learn and apply what we learn to the tools, and for things that really should be table stakes baseline aspects of what it means to be a developer like accessibility (no, your job is not done if it’s not accessible), the machine should be held to that same standard. New developments like MCP servers make me much more optimistic we can get there, but it remains a space to actively push on especially as we focus on agents and the production of larger blocks of code.