Member-only story
Being blind on the Internet
A conversation between a blind digital accessibility consultant and a UX designer
Sylvie Duchateau has been a digital accessibility consultant for over 20 years. After working for the association BrailleNet and later for Access42, a cooperative specialising in accessibility, she decided to go freelance. An expert in screen readers, she offers training, awareness sessions, and accessibility testing while also being actively involved in several organisations. Since 2021, Sylvie has also been volunteering for Paris Web, the French-speaking conference dedicated to a high-quality and accessible web.
It was at the 2024 edition of Paris Web that we met. Her guide dog, Shiva, immediately caught my attention. Sylvie Duchateau has been blind since birth and has been using a guide dog for nearly 20 years. A few months after our meeting, I wanted to ask her about her needs online and her vision on accessibility. Yes, pun intended.
Sylvie told me about the obstacles she regularly encounters, such as impossible-to-bypass CAPTCHAs, poorly designed cookie banners, and inaccessible virtual keyboards. She also explained how her braille display works — a device that allows her to read the screen line by line through 40 tactile characters.
