My dad doesn't know what I do for a living
And explaining it to him isn't as easy as it seems it should be.
My father said to me "I still don't know what you do for a living", when we spoke on the phone yesterday. And I said that I'd told him a few times. "I forgot, or it's too complicated, or it's too technical. Something. I don't know what you do for a living", he added
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My father is a very intelligent man. He knows so much. But technology... I won't say he's a Luddite, but he's certainly no huge friend of technology. I understand him not understanding. And it made me think - how many other people like my father just don't understand what it means when we say "I work in digital accessibility"?
How many small business owners have no idea what we're talking about when we reach out to tell them their site isn't accessible? Or that the overlay on their website is more of a problem than not?
How do we rephrase how we explain things?
For my dad, I ended up drawing parallels between physical accessibility and digital accessibility.
"You know how a house needs to have wide doors, and no step entrances, and enough space for a wheelchair to turn around in the bathroom? Well, I explain similar things, but for the web".
Then, I gave a few examples. I spoke about how if you put an image on a website, you need to write a description of the image so the software blind people use can speak the description. I spoke about how it's important to be able to resize text on the page - a concept he's familiar with since I taught him how to use CMD+ in his browser to be able to read the screen better.
What I do is a very technical thing. It's also a fairly specialized thing. And I've been doing it for long enough that I'm able to pivot and talk to designers and developers and also legal teams and leadership.
I don't think that what I do can't be easily explained in 2 or 3 short sentences to someone who isn't technologically inclined.
But we should try anyway!