Natalie MacLees has been thinking about web accessibility since before most developers had heard the word. It started with a phone call — a university’s Office of Disability Services telling her that students couldn’t use the websites she’d been happily building — and it never really stopped. Now she’s the founder of AAArdvark, an accessibility testing platform that tries to close the gap between knowing you should care about accessibility and actually knowing what to do about it.
In this episode we talked about her early days hand-coding HTML puzzle sites on GeoCities, what it felt like to move from a university job where accessibility was just how you built things into a world where nobody had ever heard of it, and the time her team at Sony said “sure, no problem” to a mandate that every other development team called impossible.
We also got into the stuff that doesn’t get talked about enough: the overlay companies selling false solutions, why AI-generated alt text misses the point, how disability is a spectrum that all of us move along, and what WordPress’s default themes actually do — and don’t — guarantee when it comes to accessibility.
Natalie makes a genuinely complex topic feel approachable without dumbing it down. Listen to the full episode or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
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