I know one - Mehmet Abi. ("Abi" is Turkish and a respectful form of address for older men.)

Mehmet, Abi and I met for the first time by chance on the platform on the way to work. When I got in, I offered him my help. He thanked us and we sat down in different seats.

A few days later, I met him again and offered to help him again. Again he accepted gratefully, only this time I asked him if I could sit down with him and we started talking. The usual small talk.

A few weeks passed until our third meeting. We were both happy to see each other again, because our tone had become more cordial in the meantime. This time we talked about deeper topics. I learned when he had lost his eyesight and how this affected (or did not affect) his everyday life.

Mehmet Abi is a telephone operator. Every morning he takes the train into town, sits down in his office for four to five hours and works. I remember how impressed I was when he told me that so casually.

I noticed that he was using his phone in a very special way. He held it diagonally to his ear and tapped the display with his fingertips in different rhythms. Twice, three times, twice again, then once and so on. I asked him what that meant, and he explained to me that this was the iPhone's blind-friendly operating function.

This led me to tell him about my profession as a web developer. I asked him if and how he uses websites in his everyday life and what he would like developers to do to improve his user experience.

His answer was: "Yes, I surf the Internet regularly. Please always make sure that each picture has a description. It's annoying when there's a picture there, but you don't know what it's supposed to represent."

Suddenly, I felt very responsible. There was a person sitting in front of me who was dependent on listening to the alternative texts to the images on the websites we created. Texts that we sighted people unfortunately often consider to be of secondary importance. Although I have always paid attention to a clean implementation of A11y (accessibility), I have never really been able to put myself in the shoes of the people who depend on it. That changed from then on.

Since then, A11y on the web has been a matter of the heart for me. Every time I write an alt text, I think of Mehmet Abi and try to do justice to his wish.

There are encounters in life that have a lasting impact on you. This was one of them.

💡 Good to know:
"A11y" stands for "Accessibility". It is a numeronym, where 11 stands for the number of letters between the letter A and the letter y.

What do you think about web accessibility? Do you also know people who depend on it? I look forward to an exchange.