What I’ve learned about accessibility lately is inextricable from what I’ve learned about both web design and AI. I came into the Spring ‘26 semester laser-focused on a distinct objective: to cobble together a not-too-embarrassing digital shed in which to house artifacts I had previously designated to live at my web address, www.smllmttrs.com. Imagining myself utterly powerless, I was desperate for hand-holding as I tried to make this happen.
Claude AI became my uncomfortable comfort object, vibe coding my digital dependency.
“How do I align the L and X and D in these vertically positioned words?”
“…⏹️…I can give you some CSS but it’s gonna cost ya…”
“…Ok…”
*copies and pastes code that renders just literal words but positioned in exactly the right way*
“Wow…ok I need some more of that…”
“Sure, I can render all your text as code to be copied and pasted…stand on me.”
This is how I first began abandoning the Headings on which users with vision impairments depend like points on a compass when seeking to orient themselves within these digital spaces. At one point, my homepage looked like this.
Maybe at first glance, this doesn’t look so bad. If however you were to linger—or, God forbid, use a screen reader—you would probably notice some quirks.,
Sighted users might have noticed at least five different fonts occurring on a single page and asked themselves, ‘Is this really what the smaller headings look like in WordPress?’
A user with vision impairment would have been able to answer that immediately:
“No. What you, my sight-blinded fellow, think you’re seeing as five levels of headers are not headers at all. In fact, my poor fooled friend, they aren’t even text. They are screenshots of text she knew your eyes wouldn’t see as such. I know this because my JAWS recognized them, told me so, and then informed me through alt-text that they are literally just images of text. It could have read them instantly had she just left them on the page as heading or paragraph blocks—had she not instead uploaded screenshots of text and plugged those into image comparison blocks because, I imagine, she wanted to avoid an alt-experience.”
Then we came into week two of this unit about accessibility, reminding me explicitly that I had already committed myself to prioritizing WCAG 3.0, and as I dug deeper for sources of information that would aid me in this quest, one truth sounded like a dripping sink: my website was a fraud. Sure I had intentions of adding alt-text to each image comparison block, but ultimately, I knew those alt-texts were going to be standing in unnecessarily for literal texts. I knew I was the fraudster.
The truth of which I eventually claimed ownership? I didn’t want to face my fears, stumble-bumbling my way through each and every WordPress block and WordPress-posted video on YouTube and YouTuber-posted video on WordPress. I didn’t want to grope my way through the darkness of my ignorance to get to where I needed to go. I didn’t want the user experience I was designing for others.
I deleted everything. I replaced seemingly polished-looking pages— because I had gone far enough down that path to figure out how to hide my fraud with font size calibration and pixel proportions—with vast uncertainty. I started stumble-bumbling. I discovered that I wasn’t the first one to feel frustrated by the limited affordances of the media-text block, and that clever workarounds using native blocks could give me the same visual layouts I wanted without requiring that I relinquish control to code I could not understand or my commitment to building a screen reader-navigable site.
I set out on this journey with the plan to achieve or surpass WCAG 3.0 compliance. Believe it or not, I haven’t set that goal aside. I have, however, been gravely humbled by it—and by all I have left to learn about web design. So, for now, no, my website isn’t 3.0-compliant. It isn’t even 2.0 compliant— but every single block on my homepage— and there are more than a few— was put exactly where it is— and formatted how it is on purpose—by me, not by Claude-code. And every single letter of text is as real as any of this can be.
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