We can learn about accessibility from courses, books, tutorials, specifications, online forums and so on. But to really go beyond we need to cooperate with people that were on the same path before. That’s what mentors are about in my opinion. They have been there before – having questions about advanced parts of accessibility, getting from specialist to expert and so on.
In 2021 I’ve been curious as always and stumbled upon Accessibility Mentoring Program by accessiblecommunity.org (now mutua11y.org, opens in new window). I did not hesitate and applied to be a protégé. I thought first to maybe become a mentor, but I don’t think I am qualified to be a mentor for people that have gone through basics. The condition to be a mentor were also perfectly defined (at least 5 but rather 10 years of experience for example).
Starting as a protégé of Léonie Watson
I applied just before the deadline, 24th of December 2021 and got a positive response on first of February 2022. It felt amazing, because I knew that there were quite a lot of people interested and not everybody was selected. Accessible Community (opens in new window) sent me some documents and guidelines for meetings and I had to prepare for my first meeting with my mentor – Léonie Watson, a real accessibility expert with decades of experience (opens in new window).
I liked the structure and can’t get into details but I guess it is logical that protégés have to think about what direction will the sessions go. Some may concentrate on practical accessibility while other on how to build a career in accessibility. I’ve chosen the path of practical accessibility and prepared some developer oriented questions that I had for her – an expert in accessibility and expert in screen-readers.
In our first meeting I felt like I speak to a friend. It’s not so strange when you watch dozens of videos made by the expert, she felt like we talked before. And her kindness and professionalism with good will and humor really made our sessions unforgettable.
Subjects of our accessibility sessions
We started with some general discussions and what we would do in our sessions. I really liked the systematic approach to having kind of homework that I had to do besides our meetings. I liked that I had to invest some time and come prepared to meetings. And for the most part I managed to do it, being highly motivated.
One of the first homework was to make a full WCAG audit of a page. This was really useful for me as I had never had an expert supervision of my audits. I see that sometimes some auditors can interpret some parts of WCAG differently, so this was really useful as a starting point – to check if I am on right track. Of course it’s not feasible to go through all the details in such short time, but I learned a lot about some parts that could be interpreted differently.
After the audit we went on to practical accessibility. As mentioned – I really wanted to check some user experience patterns that I believed worked well for screen-reader users but was not quite sure. And I wanted to check alternative approaches to same patterns and really brainstormed with her about what worked best and what not.
Having an expert screen-reader users opinion is amazing for any developer and I really learned a lot from Léonie. She was also amazing with her understanding of the code and ARIA. Sometimes we discovered something that none of us had known before and I really liked how we then invested some time and dug into the details to really understand it.
I would recommend anybody to be a protégé
I’ve actually been a mentor to some developers and I must say that being a good mentor is not easy. That’s why I appreciate this experience with Léonie even more. She is amazing mentor and I really enjoyed our accessibility sessions. We came to a conclusion in the last session in July that accessibility is a field that is constantly evolving. This means that we need to constantly learn. And it also means that if we learn together we learn better. Having a mentor that knows all this and also knows how to help is amazing. Therefore I have to recommend anybody that wants to be better at, well not just accessibility, but anything to get them a mentor.
It is not always possible to get a mentor though, but it is always possible to find people that we can think of our mentors. Learning from their online presences is also a way of mentoring program. But if possible it is still the best to have a real mentor that can dedicate some time to you and that points you to right directions.
