Once upon a time, there lived a Creature of type fairy, called Maia. She was a programmer with low vision, meaning that even with her glasses, she could only see vague shapes and not concrete objects. She had lost most of her eyesight at an age before she had learned to read. This meant she relied on the help of various assistive devices to tell her what was happening, most notably, her Screen Reader, which was a special device that could read out loud the content on her computer screen. A typical programmer, she spent most of her day in front of her computer.

Something she had come to realise early on in her career, was that one of the biggest and most popular websites she used to assist her in her work was not user-friendly for Creatures with eyesight issues. It was littered with adverts, meaning that she had to listen to every ad in between the information she wanted, and a lot of the information that was read out on her Speech Reader was geared toward sighted users and did not have any use to her. Something needed to change. She felt she was at a severe disadvantage. It took her twice as long to finish her work, and she believed she could create a better service for Creatures.

After some serious thinking, she decided to create her own website specifically for blind and low vision Creatures who were programmers. It would be in the form of a FAQ, much like the existing website for sighted users, where fairies, gnomes and other mythical creatures could post questions and answers as a community, on various code spells and chants. There would be no adverts, and no extra information which did not serve her. She decided to use a language learning model to collect and collate all the information into her service, then structure it so that it was read out in a sensible fashion.

So she began. First up, she had to learn about ARIA, which stood for Accessible Rich Internet Applications, and was a way of making websites more accessible to those with various disabilities. This involved adding various attributes to the HTML pages such that the assistive technology could correctly interpret what was on the screen. She added a few aria snippets to the HTML on her home page to test it out, the screen reader read out what was on screen in a way that made such perfect sense, it was magical. She could clearly imagine how the webpage looked, down to each section and letter.

Over the course of a few years, she continued adding to her website, collecting all the information that was already available on the previous website using a special tool, and making it accessible, by removing duplicated speech sections and useless descriptions of breadcrumbs that offered no value, adding logical flows, and descriptions to all diagrams - images were not allowed on this site, only diagrams which could be described.

Five years later, she was done. Her website was complete and she swiftly deployed it into production.

Almost immediately, traffic began arriving at the website. Posts were upvoted, comments added, questions asked and answered. By the end of the first day, she had to upgrade the server she hosted the website on, as it had grown massively in such a short time. In fact, it seemed to be growing even faster than the original website!

Maia came to learn that programmer Creatures of all types, from fairies to elves, to gnomes and goblins, flocked to the website, to see the magical inclusive digital realm. It didn’t matter whether they could see or not - although the site was primarily intended for blind users, sighted users got a lot of value from it as well, as it was so simple and easy to use.

Maia’s story ends here, but not without the knowledge that her greatest joy wasn’t the success of the website; it was the knowledge that she had made a difference in the lives of blind Creatures everywhere. Her story serves as a testament to the boundless capabilities of determination, creativity, and the desire to make the world a better place.