a11y0 – The Origin Story

Imagine Steve Jobs slowly losing his eyesight. He knew, years before it happened, that he was going blind. What would he have built? What would a polished, delightful experience look like if someone with that level of obsession had actually designed it for the blind?

That's the world I want to create.

Three things got me here.

Growing up, my home was in the neighbourhood of a school for the blind. Blind students were part of the landscape of my childhood, walking around, navigating a sighted world that wasn't built for them, and doing it anyway. One of the best computer teachers I had was slowly losing his eyesight. It was only a matter of time before he'd be completely blind. I didn't have the words for it then, but something about seeing that stayed with me.

Then, years later, during a routine eye check-up in the US, the doctor examined my results and looked puzzled. He said there was something he couldn't quite explain, and he wanted to share my scans with colleagues before saying more. I never completed those sessions. But somewhere in the back of my mind, a thought lodged itself: I might one day share the same fate as my computer teacher.

The third thing happened while I was working as a designer. I got introduced to two brothers who had both lost most of their vision in their teens. Both were doing well, genuinely well. And talking to one of them, I started to piece together why. Access to a computer was a big part of it. It opened doors that would otherwise have stayed shut. When he was losing his vision, a career counsellor told him to look into basket weaving. That was supposed to be his future. Instead, he ended up leading a marketing team at a major company.

That conversation made me think. How many people, in this country and in the world, have lost their vision and don't even have that option? And for those who do manage to get online, what are they actually working with? Digital experiences built as an afterthought. Barely usable. Functional at best. Not designed for them, designed around them, or worse, in spite of them.

Steve Jobs talked about the computer as a bicycle for the mind. He built products so refined, so considered, that Jobs himself once said of the buttons on screen: "you'll want to lick them." But that bicycle was built for people who could see. What does it look like for someone who can't? How would a blind person experience that same sense of awe?

Nobody has really tried to answer that question yet. Not seriously.

That gap is what a11y0 is about.

It is derived from the shorthand for accessibility, which is a11y (11 characters between the a and the y), read and pronounced as ally to communicate being a friend to people with disabilities.

The 0 signifies what I think needs to be done — accessibility from Zero, not retrofitted, not patched onto the side of something built for someone else. Reimagined from the ground up, with blind and low-vision users at the centre from the start.

I don't have all the answers. I'm not even sure I have the right questions yet. But I'm done thinking about this and not doing anything. So I'm starting to write. To work through ideas, share progress, and find the people who actually live with today's screen reader experience and can tell me where I'm getting it wrong. That guidance matters more to me than any framework I could come up with on my own.

This is where that thinking will live.