Accessibility isn’t a checklist I run against your product. It’s how I’ve navigated the world my entire life.
I’m Sarah Massengale, founder of SM Accessibility Consulting. I was born totally blind, and I’ve spent more than twenty years living inside the access technology most companies only encounter as a line in a spec. When I test your site with a screen reader, I’m not simulating a user — I am one, with two decades of fluency in what works, what’s merely compliant, and what quietly wastes a disabled person’s time.
That distinction drives everything I do. Plenty of consultants can hand you a report mapping every success criterion you’ve missed. I do that too — but I won’t stop there, and I won’t pretend a tidy audit is the same as an accessible experience. I work from a Disability Justice framework: I triage by real-world impact and by who gets harmed first, not by whichever issue is easiest to log. Compliance is the floor. Usable, dignified, genuinely inclusive design is the actual job.
In practice, that’s accessibility audits and usability testing that tell you how real assistive-technology users will fare; document remediation and plain-language work that make your content usable, not just technically conformant; and training that hands your team the judgment to keep it that way after I’m gone.
My credentials support the lived experience rather than stand in for it. I’m an IAAP-certified CPACC and ADS. I serve on the board of the National Federation of the Blind of South Carolina, the IAAP Global Leadership Council, and the National Advisory Council for the Rhonda Weiss Center for Accessible IDEA Data, and I edit the Top Tech Tidbits newsletter. I present at conferences including CSUN and the M-Enabling Summit — and my favorite standing work is with Into Design Systems, running accessible-component workshops for a community of designers across the US and Europe.
If you want accessibility work measured by whether disabled people can actually use what you’ve built — not just whether you’ve covered yourself — let’s talk.