I Learned Accessibility by Hitting the Barriers First

I've had barriers around me for as long as I can remember, the obvious ones and the ones that took years to even name, and most days I still don't clock which kind I'm hitting until I'm already stuck.

Some are easy to point at. A building with steps and no ramp. A form that assumes you process information the same way everyone else does. A system built for one kind of body and one kind of brain, and if you're not it, that's apparently your problem to solve.

Others you just feel. You hit them, over and over, until you start believing the problem is you. It isn't.

For a long time I kept all of that separate from my work. Accessibility was something I applied to other people's stuff. My own life was just life.

Then I noticed I was building the exact same barriers into my own business without even realising it.

Learning didn't happen in one go

When I got into digital marketing, I didn't learn it the way everyone online describes learning it: sit down, grind through hours of research, come out the other side with a full map of everything.

My brain doesn't hold that much at once. If I force it, I lose all of it.

So I learned in pieces. One video. One article. One idea small enough to hold onto, before my brain checked out and refused to take in anything else. Then I'd stop. Come back later. Try again.

For a while I thought that meant I was behind everyone else. I wasn't. I just needed a different pace, and nobody had ever told me that was allowed.

Numbers were the real fight

Numbers are what got me, not the ideas, not the strategy behind them.

I have dyscalculia, diagnosed late, which probably explains why I spent years assuming I just wasn't smart enough to get it.

Analytics dashboards. Percentages. Reach. Engagement rate. People assume dyscalculia is dyslexia for numbers, like the digits swap around or get mixed up. Mine doesn't work like that. I can see a number fine. Ask me to do 7 plus 5 and I'll count it out on my hands like I'm six years old, because I genuinely cannot conceptualise how big a number is. It just doesn't land as a real quantity in my head, no matter how long I try to make it click, and pushing through it can tip straight into a meltdown. That's not an exaggeration. It's just what happens.

I stopped trying to read every number and started reading shape instead. What's climbing. What's dropping. What's flat. I still work that way now. The way I access the information changed, not the information itself.

Accessibility works the same way. It's rarely about what someone can or can't do. Usually the information was just never built for how they take things in.

What nobody puts in the course

There's a side of this work that never makes it into a course, and it's the side holding everything else up.

Networking is one. I've noticed I can hold a real conversation about the work for as long as you want, but the second it turns into a performance, and it's usually the room, the small talk, the angling for something, I check out.

Open calendars are the other one. People call it "flexibility," anyone can book you in whenever suits them. For me it means my week comes apart with no warning. I need to know where my working hours start and stop.

It took me way too long to admit that was a real need and not me being difficult.

Energy doesn't come in a flat rate

Most marketing advice assumes you can hold one steady pace forever. Post daily. Show up constantly. Reply fast. Be everywhere, all the time.

That's never been my life.

I've got fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue. Some days I've got a lot to work with. Some days almost nothing. I rarely get much warning either way.

I spent years trying to force myself into the same rhythm as everyone else, and it never held, it just ended in burnout, then rebuilding from zero, over and over, a shit cycle to be stuck in.

Now I build the business around the version of me that actually shows up, not the one I wish I was on my best day.

Not really seeing myself in this industry

There's a harder thing underneath all of this, and it's less about logistics.

A lot of marketing spaces weren't built with people like me in mind. There's a pretty narrow idea of who you're meant to be: either polished and aesthetic in a way that's never felt like mine, or buttoned-up and corporate in a way that doesn't fit either.

I'm disabled. I'm also queer and nonbinary.

I don't see a lot of people holding all of that at once in the spaces I learn from or work in, and it makes it harder to believe there's room for you, even when you technically know there is.

Why accessibility, then

This is why it matters to me. Not as a design principle I picked up somewhere, but as a habit of noticing what gets in the way.

Once you start clocking the barriers in your own life, you can't stop seeing them everywhere else: in content that assumes too much all at once, in systems built to run on constant energy, in advice that only ever works for one kind of brain, one kind of body, one kind of week.

Accessibility, to me, means building things so more people can actually use them, without assuming everyone starts from the same place. Not perfect. Usable.

And that includes the person making the thing, not just the person on the other end of it.

I still don't have all of this figured out. I still avoid opening a dashboard some days. I still second-guess whether there's room for me in half the rooms I sit in. But I know what a barrier feels like from the inside now, and that's enough to keep building things differently.