Rolling my way to digital accessibility

I became a junior developer and accessibility specialist in one year or 20, depending on how you look at it.

Exactly one year ago, on January 21st 2019, I was broke, unemployed, and ready to start my first day at a web development training program. Today I’m a Junior Developer and Accessibility Specialist at a Finnish digital agency called Wunder. I’ve been here for two months and I can already tell you that this is the best job I’ve ever had.

This is not an article about how to get your first developer job in a year.

Because I didn’t make this happen in a year.

In fact, it all unfolded over the course of two decades. If you’d like to hear about how disability and accessibility shaped the twists and turns that took me here, read ahead! For a more focused account of the last year, check out my article on the Wunder website instead.

Chancing upon Deaf culture

The moment I became aware that disabled people existed was that one Sunday at age 9. I was holding my grandma’s hand as we walked across my most beloved square in Pontevedra, Galicia, Spain, where I come from. Praza da Ferrería, Ironworks Square, was my absolute favorite place in the whole city, because hundreds of pigeons used to hang out there, eating from your hand if you had anything to offer. That’s also why I will always think of it as Praza das Pombas, Pigeon Square, even though pigeons can no longer be found there.

What caught my attention that day was a group of a dozen adults standing in a circle. I had never seen grownups standing in such formation. I noticed their hands moving in turns. As my grandma kept walking, my eyes stayed behind watching, the wheels in my head kept turning, and I realized: they were having a conversation in sign language!

About 10 years later, thanks to a scholarship, I was living in Central America in an international boarding high school called United World College Costa Rica. During my second and last year there, they announced we would be getting Costa Rican Sign Language as an extracurricular activity. I was the first to sign up.

Incidentally, it was also in Costa Rica that I fell in love with the Finnish language, after hearing my Finnish schoolmates talk to each other. The first Finnish words I learned were aurinko (sun), kuu (moon), pilvi (cloud), and tähti (star).

When I went back to Galicia that summer, my grandma told me that her friend’s son, Víctor, was Hard of Hearing. Over coffee at my favorite café, Víctor told me that, every Sunday, a group of Deaf people met up in my beloved Pigeon Square. Although Costa Rican and Spanish sign languages belong to different families (the genealogies of sign languages do not mirror their hearing counterparts), I hung out with them a few times, and we were able to understand each other. I still wonder if any of the Pontevedran Deaf people I met in 2009 were the same ones I had seen in the very same Pigeon Square ten years earlier. Still, something in me felt like I’d gone full circle.

At the end of that summer I moved to the US to attend Cornell University, once again thanks to a generous scholarship. I had almost gone to Brown instead, because they had American Sign Language (ASL) courses, but the program I’d be joining there (Development Studies) wasn’t as interesting as the one at Cornell (International Agriculture and Rural Development).

But that’s not what I studied after all. That program was focused on creating policymakers; I was (and still am) of the mind that the people creating rules and regulations should have real lived experience in the very things they aim to manage and govern. So I ended up switching to Agricultural Sciences, and then adding Plant Science as a second degree. It’s funny to think that my most hated subject in Spanish high school had been, precisely, biology.

(One of the downsides of completing two Bachelor’s degrees in the time allocated for one, while working and volunteering at the same time, is that I never had time to go across town to take ASL courses at Ithaca College or the Finger Lakes Independence Center.)

From politics to disability

After my second summer in the US, in 2011, I took time off to go to Galicia and shoot a documentary about the importance of goats in the traditional Galician silvopastoral ecosystem; how rural exodus, mass emigration, and Franco’s dictatorship had dismantled that system; and the atrocious economic and environmental effects that ensued. The documentary remains unfinished due to a car accident and other calamities, but during my 1.5 years off I also got involved in EQUO, a nascent Spanish political party focused on sustainability and social equality.

Some of the most active EQUO members in Galicia at the time were disabled, and also part of Foro de Vida Independiente y Divertad (the Spanish Forum for Independent Living, Dignity, and Freedom), and had been at the frontlines of defining EQUO’s political proposals when it came to disability and functional diversity (the latter term is preferred by Spanish disability activists). Thanks to them, my interest in Deaf culture grew into full-on engagement with accessibility in all its forms… except for digital accessibility, because that was too abstract and complicated for me at the time.

(I eventually parted ways with EQUO, because I disagreed with some crucial decisions made by the party at large; I have since realized that party-based politics are not my cup of tea.)

A few months after I returned to Cornell, in 2013, I became disabled for the first time. A mysterious pain took over my lower half in a way that made walking almost impossible. Nobody (campus doctors, professors, peers) told me about the disability services Cornell had available, and which I had a right to use. So I didn’t get a wheelchair, a free bus pass, or university car rides to all my classes and university activities, like I should have. Instead, I paid for the bus to and from campus, and struggled on borrowed crutches between classes. I was always late, because it took me 20 minutes to hobble what I used to be able to walk in 5.

As hard as that time was, it made me gain a much more nuanced understanding of physical accessibility. After all, it is one thing to talk and read about something, and an entirely other thing to live it.

That summer I worked in a ladybug research lab, where I got to sit most of the day. Not dragging my body across campus all day did wonders for my recovery, and by the end of the summer I wasn’t using crutches anymore. Unfortunately, my ankles had become unstable and weak, so I injured myself easily, which resulted in me still using crutches or a cane on and off after that.

Fast forward to 2015. I had graduated from Cornell and moved to Finland to learn Finnish and look for work. After a brief period living on a farm in Sipoo, I got a tech-adjacent job in Helsinki and moved to the city. I applied for, and got accepted into, a Master’s degree at the University of Helsinki (MSc in Plant Production Science). Life was great!

Then, a couple of months before starting my Master’s, in the summer of 2016, my mysterious pain came back with a vengeance, all over my body. I couldn’t afford to only study, and I couldn’t physically manage to work and study, so I deferred the Master’s for a year and continued working full time. I started using my cane again, then crutches, and then a rollator.

While this time around I was able to better advocate for myself at the doctor’s office, I was once again unaware of many of my rights, and I didn’t yet understand the Finnish social and healthcare system in the way I do now. Also, as I was then beginning to realize, my boss didn’t have much regard for neither ethics nor the law, and hired immigrants specifically because we were more vulnerable and less able to stand up to mistreatment.

After almost a year working for him, and several months of him knowing about my struggles with both my health and the public healthcare system, I found out (from a nurse) that he should have been providing us with private occupational healthcare. Things continued to deteriorate when I brought this to his attention and I was met with platitudes and excuses. In the end, it didn’t matter that I was instrumental in growing the company from a two-person mess into an orderly business with 20+ employees that often invoiced half a million euros in a day. I ended up unemployed and broke.

In spite of having graduated with honors from one of the world’s Top 15 universities, I’d had trouble landing a job, on account of not speaking fluent Finnish. It was even harder finding another one afterwards, because I couldn’t do anything physical, which meant that farm work, cleaning, and most of the service industry were out of the question. I held on to the idea of the Master’s for a year, but ultimately dropped out when I accepted that my body was not reliable enough to be in a profession that requires physical labor.

Focusing on digital accessibility

Fast forward again to 2018. I had finally found treatment that worked for me, I didn’t need to use my rollator every day, and in general I was doing much better. I was beginning to explore games as a storytelling medium, after a lifetime of dabbling in many other art forms.

I had done a bit of statistical programming at Cornell; but when I started crafting interactive experiences with Twine (and later, Unity), I realized that coding was the key to communicating all those ideas that were floating around in my brain, too complex to be carried by writing, drawing, painting, dance, theatre, music, or film alone.

Towards the end of that year I decided I wanted to switch to a coding career. In December I found out about Integrify, a Helsinki-based startup that trains immigrants and refugees in coding skills. I submitted an application right away, and ended up being selected into their next program starting in January.

From the very beginning, I knew I wanted to specialize in accessible web development, which our program didn’t cover at all. We had class 9–5 every weekday for 6 months, but I routinely stayed late, whether it was because I was learning more about digital accessibility on the side, because I wanted to take a class project to the next level, or because I was working on a freelance project.

We had a summer break in July, but there’s no rest for the wicked. As it happens, there was a new coding school in the making (Hive Helsinki, part of the growing 42 Network), and I had been progressing through the admission process since the beginning of the year. I got a spot for Hive’s first ever selection Piscine, a very intense bootcamp that kept me occupied for 12–15 hours per day for 4 weeks.

In August I went back to Integrify for our final stretch, during which we worked in groups to bring real client projects to life. At the end of that month I also gave a talk about accessible web development at the HelsinkiJS monthly meetup. Afterwards, Jukka Paasonen from Finnair approached me and invited me to give the talk at Finnair HQ in Vantaa, which we organized for a couple of weeks later.

In September, when I graduated from Integrify, I was having interviews with four companies (including Wunder), all of which were interested in me because of the accessibility angle. But the more I learned about Wunder, the more I knew it was the perfect fit for me.

And now I’m a Junior Developer and Accessibility Specialist at Wunder. If you wanna know more about how that happened, and why I love it here, have a look at, you guessed it, my article on the Wunder website.

In addition to working full time, I’m also a part-time student at Hive. Thanks to Hive, I’m working with completely different technologies, and really understanding the way computers work at a deep level. I hope that this will help me become a better digital accessibility professional in the future, but for now, I’m just enjoying the ride!