Chapter 02 — The TeamHear it from the people
who do the work
Our auditors transitioned from engineering, design, and QA. They know the code because they wrote it. They know the failures because they shipped them.
Testimonials from Comply team members are displayed in an animated mosaic. All testimonials are listed here for screen reader users.
I ran a screen reader through their Fortune 500 checkout flow expecting maybe a dozen issues. We logged 47 violations before we even reached the payment step. The modal alone had 8 — missing role, broken focus trap, no ESC handler, invisible focus ring on the close button. When you know what to listen for, it's impossible to un-hear.
Meredith Okafor, Senior Accessibility Auditor, 3 yrs at Comply. Former front-end engineer at a fintech startup. Discovered accessibility after a blind coworker showed me what our app sounded like through NVDA.
The aria-live region is one of the most misunderstood ARIA attributes in production code. Developers add role='status' and think they're done. But timing matters — if your live region updates before the user's screen reader has finished reading the previous announcement, they hear nothing. We've seen this break password reset flows for an entire user segment.
Tariq Brennan, ARIA Systems Specialist, 2 yrs at Comply. Transitioned from front-end development after spending 6 months learning VoiceOver. Now I audit the same patterns I used to write.
I came from graphic design. My first week here, someone handed me a contrast analyzer and told me to audit a marketing site. I found a hero section where the CTA button had a 1.8:1 contrast ratio — technically white text on a pale yellow. The design team had signed off on it. I learned that day that 'looks fine to me' is the most expensive sentence in accessibility.
Sofia Delacroix, Visual Accessibility Analyst, 1.5 yrs at Comply. Graphic designer turned accessibility specialist. Obsessed with the intersection of beautiful design and universal access.
The keyboard navigation audit is where we find the most critical failures. Tab order that skips form fields. Dropdowns that open on hover but have no keyboard equivalent. Modals that appear but never receive focus. We keyboard through every single interactive element, every time. It takes hours. It's not optional.
James Osei-Mensah, Keyboard Navigation Specialist, 4 yrs at Comply. Started as a QA engineer. Got interested in accessibility when a keyboard-only tester showed me how much of our product was simply unreachable.
Section 508 deadlines feel arbitrary until a government contractor gets a demand letter. Then suddenly every 72-hour sprint matters. We've helped three contractors remediate critical violations in under two weeks. The secret is ruthless prioritization — fix the blockers first, document the rest with a remediation timeline that satisfies legal review.
Priya Chakrabarti, Compliance & Reporting Lead, 3.5 yrs at Comply. Former legal tech PM who discovered that most accessibility compliance failures were engineering problems, not policy problems.
I transitioned from front-end development into accessibility consulting three years ago, and the thing that surprised me most was how technical the work actually is. People assume it's about adding alt text. The real work is understanding AT quirks — why NVDA reads a custom combobox differently than JAWS, why VoiceOver on iOS behaves differently from macOS. That knowledge only comes from hours of testing.
Marcus Lindqvist, Assistive Technology Specialist, 3 yrs at Comply. Front-end developer for 8 years before transitioning to accessibility full-time. Still writes the occasional React component.
