When Accessibility Actually Gives You Access

Startup credits, neurodivergence and why handing somebody a thousand pages of documentation isn't support

There is a running joke available here about being queer, transgender, non-binary and neurodivergent and finally getting something useful out of ticking the diversity and inclusion boxes.

I am absolutely going to make that joke.

But underneath it is something considerably more important.

Support programmes and startup credits can materially change what an early-stage company is capable of building.

For Alt Production Group, access to Azure startup resources gave us room to experiment, develop and learn at a scale that would otherwise have been substantially more difficult for a solo founder to fund.

For that, we're genuinely grateful.

But the experience also made something else increasingly obvious.

Access to a resource and accessibility of that resource are not the same thing.

“Here is all the information” isn't always accessible

Technology is spectacularly good at documentation.

Documentation for the documentation.

Portals.

Dashboards.

Knowledge bases.

Support trees.

Eligibility pages.

Product catalogues.

Pricing calculators.

Six different pages that almost answer your question and a seventh page explaining that the thing you're looking for has been renamed.

For some people, that's fine.

For an AuDHD founder already holding an entire company architecture in their head, it can become another wall of information competing for limited executive function.

The frustrating part is that the technology industry should understand this better than almost anybody.

There are enormous numbers of neurodivergent people working in technology.

Many of us are extremely capable of understanding complicated systems.

That does not automatically mean we're equally good at navigating enormous quantities of fragmented administrative information.

Those are different cognitive tasks.

Sometimes accessibility is a person

One-to-one support can completely change that experience.

Not somebody doing the work for you.

Somebody who understands the landscape well enough to say:

This is the bit relevant to you.

Speak to this person.

You probably qualify for this.

Don't waste three hours reading that because it isn't applicable.

That kind of support can unlock more value than another hundred pages of documentation.

And that has influenced the way we think about accessibility at Alt.

Accessibility isn't merely whether a website technically passes a set of interface tests.

It is also whether a person can realistically navigate a system, understand their options and reach the outcome the system supposedly exists to provide.

Inclusion should remove unnecessary barriers

This is where conversations about diversity and inclusion can become unnecessarily polarised.

Our position isn't that somebody should automatically receive an opportunity simply because they belong to a minority group.

It is that somebody with the capability to compete shouldn't be prevented from doing so by an unnecessary barrier that has nothing to do with that capability.

If somebody can understand an extraordinarily complicated technical architecture but struggles to process twenty overlapping pages describing a funding programme, making that information easier to navigate isn't lowering the standard.

It is removing noise.

And if removing that noise allows another capable founder to build something extraordinary, everybody wins.

Although yes:

after spending much of a lifetime discovering the less entertaining consequences of being different, receiving some useful startup infrastructure support does at least justify one moment of:

Finally. The diversity box paid out.

We'll take it.