There’s a phrase I’ve heard a few times in accessibility work: “catching the accessibility bug.”
It usually happens one of two ways.
Sometimes people encounter accessibility because a project requires it—compliance, client demand, legal necessity. Over time, they see what it actually does for real people, and something shifts. They can’t not care anymore.
Other times, people catch it because accessibility changes their own life.
That’s how it happened for me.
She doesn’t apply herself
I was an early reader and an early writer. There was never much mystery about whether I was capable, and most of the time I did well in school. I generally got good grades.
But when I struggled, I really struggled.
Starting around fifth or sixth grade, the explanation I kept hearing—over and over—was the same:
She’s smart. She just doesn’t apply herself.
That phrase followed me for years.
Middle school... high school, even into college.
What made this so hard to untangle is that my struggle didn’t look like what most people expect. I genuinely loved learning. I especially liked science and math topics, and I enjoyed writing. In high school, I developed a set of strategies that worked surprisingly well for a long time.
In science classes, for example, I could often skip most of the reading, jump to the highlighted concepts at the end of the chapter, work through the practice problems, and come away understanding the material just fine. That approach worked well enough that I did well in science and math throughout high school.
But that only held as long as the material let me get away with it.
When the old strategies stop working
When I got to college, those same strategies started to fray.
At first, it was subtle. The approach that would’ve earned me an A in high school was suddenly getting me a C. That was my first real warning sign.
Art history was brutal. Logic was worse. Linguistics was where it really became undeniable.
I remember sitting with those books for hours, turning pages, rereading sections, spending what felt like an unreasonable amount of time on material that just wouldn’t go into my brain.
I just couldn’t seem to move through the material or retain it. I made so many flash cards for that art history class.
What’s strange is that it didn’t feel like I couldn’t read. If you’d asked me to read a paragraph out loud, I could do that just fine. I could decode the words. I could sound them out. I could keep going.
But somewhere in the middle of a paragraph, my attention would slip—and once it did, the comprehension was gone. It was like my brain kept scanning the text, but nothing was actually sticking.
From the outside, it looked like I wasn’t applying myself.
From the inside, it felt like something subtle but immovable was going wrong—and I couldn’t name it.
The moment everything shifted
By the time I left my first attempt at university, I was convinced I simply wasn’t ready yet. Not disciplined enough. Not mature enough.
So I went out into the world. I ran a massage practice. I did yoga teacher training. I lived life. And eventually, I came back to higher education for a second attempt.
In 2011, I bought my first Kindle.
Almost casually, I changed an accessibility setting and made the text larger.
That meant fewer words on the page. Less visual density and more space.
And suddenly, I could read again.
Not “on a good day.”
Not “with effort.”
Just… normally—the way I’d read Nancy Drew books as a kid, or Deep Space Nine novels in middle school. Just normal reading. At first, I thought my self-discipline had finally caught up with me. That maybe all those teachers had been right after all.
But then I noticed something strange.
The textbooks that weren’t available digitally ranged from challenging to effectively impossible for me to read. I don’t ever need to look at that biochemistry book again. Just putting that out there.
That’s when my understanding of what had been happening finally shifted.
What I’d been experiencing for years wasn’t a lack of effort. When too much information was presented at once, my comprehension didn’t gradually fade—it shut off. And when that happened, what I experienced subjectively was “distraction.”
The problem wasn’t really motivation or discipline.
The problem was in my brain and it was solved with a change in the interface.
Relearning how I learn
Once I understood that, everything changed.
I stopped trying to force myself to read the way other people did. Instead, I started actively engaging the material in ways that kept my brain online.
I sketched geological formations on whiteboards and explained them to other people. I drew chemical reactions step by step. I filled my notes with diagrams and pictures instead of walls of text.
Later, I noticed something else: drawing helped me stay present in class. When I felt my focus starting to slip, pulling out an iPad and sketching a volcano in my geology lecture—even if I didn’t really need to draw a volcano—helped anchor my attention to the material. It gave my brain something to do that was still connected to what I was learning.
That was often the difference between staying engaged and getting pulled into stray thoughts, or often falling asleep, which is what most of my first trip through college looked like.
With the right supports in place, it worked.
I got degrees in chemistry and math, and nearly got a geology minor.
I genuinely don’t think that would have happened without that accessibility feature. I might still think I was a bad learner who couldn’t stay focused or work hard enough to finish my studies.
Why this still matters to me
That experience permanently changed how I think about interfaces and my own brain.
A lot of accessibility comes down to something very simple: respecting the medium—writing the semantic HTML that everyone always says they’ve mastered, and then letting the browser and assistive technologies do what they’re already designed to do.
Not because it’s extra. Not because it’s a checklist, but because it’s foundational. And the impact of getting that right can be enormous.
Sometimes, accessibility doesn’t just help.
Sometimes, it can change everything.