When people talk about digital accessibility, many imagine a list of technical constraints or a topic reserved for people with disabilities. The story and practice of Maxime Varin tell a very different story: a human, collective issue, and a lever for improvement for everyone. They also reveal a less visible reality: navigating a world designed primarily for vision, with tools and methods that turn every action into a strategy.
Born with total blindness, Maxime has no memory of sight. That didn’t stop him from completing his entire schooling in mainstream classes, all the way to a bachelor’s degree in computer science. He describes this journey with clear-eyed lucidity: receiving class notes after exams when he depended on Braille paper, difficulties, and discrimination. A daily life made of constant adjustments. These obstacles are not just unfortunate incidents; they reveal how deeply unequal the digital world still is, where the form of access conditions opportunity. Yet Maxime persevered. His success is not a miraculous exception, but the result of methodical rigor, trained memory, and refined adaptation techniques, such as listening carefully in class, memorizing, and only typing after the explanation is finished to preserve coherence.
Today, Maxime has been working in digital accessibility for several years. For him, this is not just a technical field of expertise: it is a living, hybrid practice that requires as much empathy as knowledge. His daily work is a blend of rigor, ingenuity, and collaboration. He uses the JAWS screen reader and a Braille display — two complementary tools. Speech synthesis gives him speed and fluidity; Braille offers precision and granularity: punctuation, structure, style, typographic nuances that a voice does not always render distinctly. Braille remains relevant, especially for proofreading texts or conducting accessibility audits. The tool has not lost its value; its usefulness has simply evolved with technology, toward different uses such as web browsing or detailed rereading.
Maxime explores artificial intelligence with pragmatism. He sees real potential in it, especially for turning otherwise inaccessible information into usable text and for comparing documents. Asking AI to show only the differences between two versions of Word files, to spot specific terms, or to summarize lengthy reports proves remarkably effective for someone who navigates without sight. Where a screen reader would deliver a linear, fleeting stream of content, AI can produce a structured, stable summary that can be browsed and annotated. AI also makes subtitling easier, as well as extracting key ideas and formatting documents. And above all, it can deliver a textual answer even when the original source is itself inaccessible — which avoids having to explore poorly designed sites. But Maxime insists: AI is neither magical nor autonomous. Without good design from the start, no technology can fix inaccessibility. AI needs a solid foundation: meaningful content, structure, and useful metadata. Otherwise, it magnifies flaws or works around them at random.
Accessibility is not the job of a single stakeholder. It depends on an ecosystem: UX teams, content writers, developers, product, compliance, user support, and the users themselves. It is best to integrate accessibility from the earliest stages of the design cycle. This is simpler, more economical, and more reliable than late fixes. What matters is not just that “the screen reader announces something,” but that the information is contextualized, understandable, and consistent with the expected action. The real question is equivalent experience: can you accomplish the same task with the same clarity and level of control, even without any visual perception of the result? For example, “put text in bold” is accessible if a keyboard shortcut works; but if the visual result is not reflected in non-visual feedback (through semantic tags, announced styles, or context), the action loses its meaning for a blind user. Accessibility is the sum of many small attentions — heading structure, main regions, explicit labels, interface states, action-oriented error messages — which together make use intelligible.
Standards (WCAG internationally, SGQRI in Quebec) have advanced practice but do not guarantee a quality experience. Some best practices remain recommendations and are too easily dropped when deadline pressure or the search for aesthetics takes over. In Quebec, the absence of a formal law and of widespread accessibility statements leaves compliance “to everyone’s goodwill.” The result: platforms become inaccessible from one day to the next — regressions that are costly in time and energy for users, who must look for workarounds. The irony can be cruel: you may want to complain about inaccessibility but find that the complaint form itself is not accessible.
Moreover, accessibility cannot easily be quantified as a percentage; it is deeply qualitative. A site can tick a checklist of criteria and still be difficult to use if the overall logic is not designed for different modes of perception and action. Color contrast, often cited, illustrates the tension between numeric values and real-world perception: thresholds exist, but the experience varies with the display environment, hardware, visual fatigue, and combinations of disabilities (visual, motor, cognitive, auditory).
Navigating with a screen reader means accessing one line at a time: information that is “temporary and fleeting,” with no immediate overview of the document. This linear mode shapes the mental workload: you have to build a cognitive map, memorize structures, reconstruct hierarchies, and anticipate paths. The visual interface, by contrast, offers a simultaneous density of information — headings, menus, columns, visual markers — that can be grasped at a glance. This difference explains many misunderstandings between sighted and blind people. There is a double barrier: sighted people sometimes hesitate to engage or adapt, for fear of doing the wrong thing; while blind people do not always anticipate how sighted people explore visual space and rely on unspoken details.
Hence the importance, in design, of making structure, relationships, and states explicit: a “disabled” button must be announced as such; an alert must describe the problem and suggest what to do next; a table must be semantically marked up to enable effective comparison.
Maxime lives with an almost military organization. He favors stable environments, trusted people, and builds mental maps to make spaces and interfaces his own. This discipline is not just a personality trait; it is a strategy for autonomy in a changing world. Every novelty — an app update, a site redesign, a physical trip — requires time to get used to. The stability of remote work offers him a helpful framework: it reduces randomness, supports concentration, and makes performance more consistent.
Despite these precautions, Maxime sometimes has to use inaccessible sites for unavoidable procedures such as filing taxes. This is where AI and advanced techniques — scripts, shortcuts, analysis of semantic code — serve as crutches, without replacing the responsibility of designers.
Perseverance and resilience are not slogans. Maxime found a job in accessibility after about 500 applications. This path says a lot about the job market: the mention of a disability still discourages some employers. Yet accessibility expertise is a strategic asset. It increases customer satisfaction, reduces legal risks, improves search engine optimization (thanks to better semantics), and broadens the market. It contributes to the overall quality of the product. Investing in accessibility is investing in robustness, clarity, and trust.
Rather than seeing accessibility as a “challenge” that puts up obstacles, Maxime considers it a “subject to be conquered.” This nuance changes everything. A challenge can feel like an immovable mountain; a subject to be conquered is a progressive exploration, where you measure, adjust, learn, and consolidate. It is an invitation: to design products that benefit everyone, reduce friction, anticipate real-world use, and listen to feedback. Accessibility is not a box to tick or a score to display. It is a quality of experience to guarantee and maintain over time. It calls for ongoing vigilance against regressions, a culture of testing and improvement, and governance that clarifies responsibilities.
Stabilize critical journeys. Payment, authentication, administrative forms: these journeys must be exemplary. A single failure here has disproportionate consequences.
To go further: download our practical guide on the accessibility lifecycle
While AI helps summarize, compare, and format, it does not exempt teams from accessible design. It acts as a multiplier when content is well-structured. It remains limited when a page is a “wall” of divs with no semantics, when text alternatives are missing, when tables lack markup, or when components do not follow accessible patterns. The irreplaceable role of human oversight remains: to discern, adapt, and contextualize. AI can propose; humans decide and refine. Maxime emphasizes that clarity and discernment come first: there is no universal solution, but rather a toolbox to combine according to the situation.
Beyond technical standards, Maxime believes we need regulatory clarity that sets a minimum and encourages the market to rise higher. A national accessibility law, public accessibility statements, and complaint mechanisms that are truly usable: these measures create a framework and send a clear signal. They create a kind of “gravity” that aligns teams and protects users against sudden regressions. However, the law is not the end point: it is the beginning of an accessibility culture, where practices evolve, feedback is exchanged, and priorities reflect the diversity of limitations — visual, motor, cognitive, and auditory.
Design the experience, not just the interface. Think through structure (headings, main regions), states (focus, active, disabled), messages (errors, confirmations), and the comparability of content. Make sure every action has feedback and that information is contextualized.
Validate with people who are directly concerned. Organize user tests with screen readers and Braille, keyboard navigation, and other assistive tools. Embrace a continuous improvement loop that measures real experience, not just compliance.
Demand regulatory clarity. Support an accessibility law, publish accessibility statements, notify users of changes that affect access, and document regressions. Make filing a complaint possible and accessible — this is a governance issue, not a detail.
To go further: download our practical guide on the digital accessibility lifecycle
What changes everything? Starting early, designing with and for users, and recognizing that technology without inclusive intent is not enough. Accessibility is not an add-on; it is a design value. It improves quality for everyone, reduces friction, and builds a lasting relationship of trust. Maxime Varin’s journey reminds us of this: perseverance and precision, supported by well-chosen tools and responsible design, turn obstacles into shared practice. Accessibility is not a solitary mountain; it is a territory to map and to conquer, together.
Download our practical guide on the digital accessibility lifecycle
Download our catalog of digital accessibility training programs
Do you have a project in mind? Talk to us about it!