I’ve been sketching for years for fun by night, and working as a web designer by day. Then one day i woke up and found that life had turned a corner unexpectedly at home, and I’ve been away from my site for awhile. I’ve been thinking about corners in life, and at work, and now 2 years into the pandemic. (Maybe we should call it the pandamnit. ;-)
When you turn a corner, you stop to assess, gather courage, and then head off in the new direction.
When I became a web designer (during the dot com bubble) the web was in its infancy. We were feeling our way along, and what we could design was limited (but exciting). As technology advanced we were able to do more, but for fewer people. If you had older tech (or no tech, or out-of-mainstream tech, or assistive tech) or had a disability, the web was not a friendly place, even prohibitive.
Accessibility (making the web friendly for those with disabilities) surfaced. It started as an initiative at the W3C, the folks who govern web standards. Turns out excluding people with disabilities is turning your back on an estimated 26% of the population. I started a push in my web design role to think about all the users and not just those with able minds and bodies or high tech.
But to no avail. Progressive Enhancement and Responsive Web came along with the smart phone and the new fangled iPad. “Now! Now we’ll ride the coattails of these strategies and techniques,” I thought. They were inclusive in some ways, but still excluded many. The W3C published the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) with objective success criteria and a new industry was born. “Now?” I thought. But it was slow going (growing?) down in the grass roots. We educated, persuaded, and advocated. Making our sites accessible to people with disabilities was right in line with the company mission. We gained more support and formulated a plan to follow an industry maturity model for our program. We worked and waited for an opening.
If you know me at all, you know I love to learn. It’s one of my strengths. So, off I went to add accessibility know-how, to web design, front-end coding, and UX design skills. There was a hole, and I could, uniquely, fill it. By the time I supported a couple of pilots, studied the guidelines and techniques, and created a standards website, I knew my stuff. We were poised for official-ness. If patience is a virtue, we were virtuous, but persistent.
Then we turned one of those corners. We became a formal Accessibility team, with sponsorship, a budget and a plan. We’ve been at it for awhile now, and I still feel a passion for what I do. It was a good corner.
While I no longer design web pages every day, my design, coding and writing experience inform my subject matter expertise. It puts me at the intersection of corners and allows me to help others adjust to change.
The path to your passion is seldom straight. There are often corners. Keep your eyes open for opportunity, prepare while you wait, and position yourself for taking those corners in stride.