Building a Startup at the Intersection of Tech, Law, and Human Rights

I thought I was doing everything right. I was building websites for chemistry courses at a university. They were clean, functional, on time. Then Disability Services called. Some students were having a hard time using the sites.

I pulled up one of the pages while we were on the phone. “What do you mean? It works fine.”

At first, I was confused. Then, as they explained that some students couldn’t use the sites at all, that confusion turned into shame and panic. Here’s a job I thought I really knew how to do. And I’ve been failing at it without realizing.

Living in Constant Motion

You can’t hold on too tightly to a single “right way” of doing things. Accessibility is humbling that way. It keeps proving you wrong, and that’s how you grow.

Of the three worlds AAArdvark sits in—tech, law, and human rights—tech is where I feel most at home. I’ve spent more than twenty years in the industry, so that’s my native language. Law is foreign territory. Human rights sits somewhere in between.

Accessibility forces you to live at the crossroads of all three, and none of them ever stand still. Technology evolves, people’s expectations shift, and our understanding of inclusion deepens. What we believed was “best practice” a few years ago might be outdated today. I learned to add alt text and form labels early in my career. Those basics still matter, but the details around custom components, mobile interactions, and assistive technology behaviors keep changing.

You can’t hold on too tightly to a single “right way” of doing things. Accessibility is humbling that way. It keeps proving you wrong, and that’s how you grow. After twenty-five years in this space, I’ve learned you’re probably wrong more often than you’re right.

I see law as a tool that helps tech catch up to human rights. As a way to create incentives for companies to build more inclusive digital experiences. In that sense, my job as a founder is being a translator, helping these three systems understand each other.

The Hardest Part

I’ve resisted adding a score to AAArdvark because it would give people false confidence. Yes, it would make the product easier to sell. But that’s exactly the problem.

The hardest part of building an accessibility startup isn’t convincing people that accessibility matters. It’s figuring out how to communicate it in a way people can understand and act on.

Take the idea of an “accessibility score.” People love metrics. A project manager or business owner who doesn’t know much about accessibility wants one number—something simple they can track and report. But a score like “100% accessible” is dangerously misleading. It only means the automated scanner didn’t find issues, not that the site is actually usable for everyone.

I’ve resisted adding a score to AAArdvark because it would give people false confidence. Yes, it would make the product easier to sell. But that’s exactly the problem. The challenge is building something that feels intuitive and motivating without oversimplifying a complex problem. It’s a constant balancing act between clarity and truth, between what people want and what they actually need.

When People Want the Quick Fix

In accessibility, resistance doesn’t usually come from bad intentions. It comes from misunderstanding. I’ve lost count of the times someone has said to me, “Can’t we just put an overlay on the site? I don’t want this to be a big deal.” They’re not saying that because they want to exclude people. They’re saying it because they don’t understand the consequences.

A big part of my job has always been helping people unlearn the myths they’ve absorbed from misleading marketing, especially the promise that a single line of JavaScript can make a website “fully compliant”, whatever that means.

When I was running an agency, some clients insisted on doing it their way—fast and cheap, accessibility be damned. So I started using a one-page waiver. They had to sign it, acknowledging they were going against my professional advice and that I couldn’t be held liable if their site faced an accessibility complaint. That document was part protection, part protest. It was a way to draw a clear line between their choice and my values.

With AAArdvark, the conversation looks different. I’m not negotiating project scopes anymore. I’m offering a platform that lets people do accessibility the right way from the start. But the core challenge hasn’t changed. I’m still helping people understand that quick fixes don’t solve human problems.

The Most Surprising Lesson

The most surprising thing I’ve learned is how often accessibility becomes performance. Many organizations want to appear accessible—to have a polished VPAT, a high score, or a nice-looking report—without committing to the deeper work of making their digital spaces usable for everyone.

I don’t think most people do this out of malice. It’s usually a symptom of the system we work in: organizations are rewarded for compliance checkboxes, not for human-centered progress. Accessibility gets treated as a marketing or legal exercise rather than a design and engineering practice.

That realization has pushed me to think differently about how we build AAArdvark. I want our platform to encourage real, sustainable accessibility work. The kind that improves experiences for users, not just optics for companies.

Accessibility as a Human Rights Issue

The internet should be one of the most liberating inventions in human history. Instead, we’ve built systems that quietly close doors.

For me, accessibility has always been a human rights issue long before it’s a compliance issue. I would still care about it even if there were no laws at all, because I’ve seen the difference it makes when people can fully participate in the digital world.

What frustrates me most is the wasted potential. The internet should be one of the most liberating inventions in human history. A place where anyone can learn, work, shop, connect, and create, regardless of their physical abilities or circumstances. For people with mobility challenges, or for whom leaving the house is difficult, digital spaces should open doors. Instead, we’ve built systems that quietly close them again.

That’s why I focus on people first. Accessibility isn’t about checking boxes. It’s about making sure everyone can benefit from the world we’ve built.

What True Accessibility Means

To me, true accessibility means that human beings can use what has been built, no matter who they are, what challenges they face, what device they use, or what situation they’re in. It’s not about screen readers or checklists or compliance scores. It’s about whether people can actually participate.

We’ll never eliminate every barrier. But we can remove as many as possible, stay curious about the ones we’ve missed, and keep working to clear them. That ongoing effort—that refusal to stop improving—is what real accessibility looks like.

The Promise and Peril of AI

What excites me most about the future of accessibility—and also scares me the most—is artificial intelligence.

AI opens up real possibility. It can make development more efficient, testing more thorough, and assistive technologies more responsive. On both sides of the equation—the builders creating digital experiences and the people using assistive tech to navigate them—AI could remove barriers we’ve struggled with for decades.

But the pace of change is overwhelming, and not every use of AI is thoughtful or helpful. Some competitors are rushing to promise that AI can “fix” accessibility automatically and that kind of messaging does real harm. It undermines trust and gives people a false sense of compliance.

So here’s what I’m committed to: AAArdvark will only use AI in ways that genuinely help builders create better, more inclusive experiences. Not faster but hallucinated reports. Not misleading automated scores. Real help.

I’d be lying if I said it doesn’t worry me. I’m afraid of being left behind, or of getting it wrong, or of building something that unintentionally causes harm. The temptation to oversimplify is strong. But I’d rather build slowly and honestly than chase hype at the expense of the people accessibility is meant to serve.

Why Accessibility Matters

…once you understand who you’ve been leaving out, it becomes impossible to keep doing it.

At its core, accessibility is about respecting the human and civil rights of other people. I honestly can’t understand why anyone would choose to build something knowing that a sizable portion of the population couldn’t use it. Why would you want to leave people out? Who do you think it’s okay to leave behind?

Whenever I see inaccessible products, I try to remind myself that most of the time it isn’t cruelty. It’s ignorance. People don’t know what accessibility is, or they don’t know how to do it, or they don’t realize who’s being excluded. Because once you do understand, once you’ve seen the impact and once you know how to fix it, there’s no reason not to.

That’s why I built AAArdvark. Not to give people scores or shortcuts, but to help them see what they’ve been missing and to make it possible to fix it. Because once you understand who you’ve been leaving out, it becomes impossible to keep doing it.