The Accessibility Investment: Kelsey Lu’s Personal Journey

Written by Kelsey Lu, Accessibility Intern, published and edited by Sheri Byrne-Haber

Digital accessibility tends to be a topic that gets labeled as an “if we have time, we’ll do it” topic. However, accessibility is incredibly important because it’s about making things work for people with disabilities. Incorporating accessibility features is necessary because it opens avenues for a historically excluded group to have equal access to digital information, which is becoming increasingly important in the modern world.

During my internship, I worked closely with my manager, Sheri Byrne-Haber, Senior Staff Accessibility Architect, to define VMware accessibility standards and conduct user research on personalization features. I immersed myself in the world of accessibility and learned what it takes to create technology that is accessible.

One of my projects involved refining auto-generated closed captions to a video titled “Probably a Bowl of Broccoli”. Ironically, this video talks about making online chat content accessible, but the content owners needed my help to make the video itself more accessible.

I’ll focus on what I learned about captions, the text of the spoken content of a video, the different factors that…