Years ago, at a low point in my life, I had to rely on government assistance to get by. Getting through the process to obtain the benefits I needed was genuinely difficult, even as a technologically literate young man of sound mind and body.
Around the same time I was doing odd jobs in my community, including helping elderly neighbors navigate computer issues. Many of them were colorblind. Some had Parkinson's or early ALS. It hit me that if I was struggling to file for food stamps, what was this experience like for them?
I didn't realize then how pivotal that would be.
Years later I found myself doing tech support across an office from a design and development team. The same people kept calling, elderly users, people with disabilities, those that just needed help. They were readily offering feedback on apps and websites that weren't built with them in mind. Something clicked. If I could learn to design these systems, I could help people at the source instead of the symptom.
There's no shortage of software that needs to work
better for more people. Human-computer interaction matters more every day than it did the day before. I'm here to help make that manageable for everyone — not just the people it was originally built for.
