When Emeline Lakrout quit her job at Unilever Plc in March after five years with the company, it wasn’t for a better offer or a career pivot. She left, she said, because too much of the software she needed in her marketing role was inaccessible to her as a blind user and invisible to her screen reader.
If coworkers asked her to use Trello, a project management tool made by Atlassian Corp, she would politely request alternatives. Software from Anaplan Inc, a company owned by the private equity firm Thoma Bravo, forced her to squint centimeters from a giant monitor, straining her remaining vision. And working on slide decks was especially vexing when her screen reader viewed slide content as images instead of text, often out of order, making presentations hard to create and decipher.
"PowerPoint broke me,” she said with a laugh.
Her managers were sympathetic but referred her to human resources. Lakrout said she reached out multiple times but the accessibility issues were never resolved. Unilever declined to comment. Before Lakrout quit, the London-based company started a programme to make Unilever "accessible and unmissable” for employees and consumers.
The Americans With Disabilities Act broadly requires reasonable accommodations for disabled people in the US, where Lakrout lives and worked for Unilever. But the 1990 law – which predated the first publicly available web pages, let alone the myriad of online tools found in today’s workplaces – doesn’t apply everywhere in the digital world.
With efforts to update the federal requirements stalled in Congress, software accessibility standards remain limited under the ADA and subject to a confusing mix of court precedents and government guidelines that can vary by state, leaving some digital technology in a legal gray area.
"My ability to be employed rested on the willingness of random companies to make their software accessible,” said Lakrout, who said she contacted several vendors directly about the obstacles she encountered.
A spokesperson for Anaplan acknowledged the accessibility challenges "inherent” to its platform, particularly its data grids with massive numbers of rows and columns. But the company said it has made improvements and developed workarounds, and it hopes artificial intelligence can further expand accessibility.
For Lakrout, the years of overcompensating took a toll. Colleagues missed the extra effort involved, she said, and she felt like an imposter even as she rose from intern to associate brand manager.
"I don't want to scare a company from ever hiring a blind person again,” said Lakrout. But she and others want change.
Calling companies out
In July, the National Federation of the Blind called on five specific software makers to stop releasing inaccessible features and to work directly with blind users. The companies named – Monday.com, Smartsheet Inc, Carta Inc, Upwork Inc and Atlassian – all make software that blind entrepreneurs commonly struggle with. According to the NFB, that makes it hard for its members to start companies.
"We don’t expect companies to become 100% accessible overnight,” said Mark Riccobono, NFB’s president. "But step one is to stop the bleeding” and "work toward real accessibility with us as partners.”
Atlassian has reached out to blind users before, including Marco Salsiccia, an accessibility designer. He said Jira, an Atlassian product he has used throughout his career, was "pretty bad” when he started. It was filled with poorly labeled fields, inaccessible layouts and a heavy reliance on mouse navigation.
In 2019, Salsiccia said, Atlassian invited him to its offices to demonstrate the issues firsthand. Jira is now more usable, he said, but its complex interface means he can’t always work as quickly as his sighted peers and sometimes has to find workarounds. That matters, he said, because using Jira is non-negotiable in many tech jobs.
Atlassian, which makes software used by 83% of the Fortune 500, said it’s working toward achieving the latest Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), the international standard developed by the World Wide Web Consortium, across its products.
Three of the other companies named by the NFB told Bloomberg they either follow a current version of the WCAG guidelines or are working toward compliance. Both Upwork and Monday.com said they welcomed collaboration with the NFB. Carta's Amanda Taggart "respectfully disagreed" with the NFB’s assessment, citing WCAG AA compliance for certain features. Smartsheet hasn’t responded to a request for comment.
Microsoft Corp and Alphabet Inc’s Google – both sponsors of the NFB’s convention – are widely recognised as having made big strides in the inclusivity of their products. But blind workers report persistent problems with Office 365 (including PowerPoint) and Google Workspace.
"While we’re proud of the progress we’ve made, we know there’s always more to do,” Jenny Lay-Flurrie, Microsoft’s chief accessibility officer, told Bloomberg. Google didn’t respond to requests for a comment.
Unresolved tickets
Current US law generally places the burden of accessibility on the employer. If a company licenses inaccessible third-party tools and an employee cannot use them, the employer, not the vendor, is legally liable under Title I of the ADA, according to Claire Stanley, the director of advocacy and government affairs at the American Council of the Blind.
"That’s why we tell companies: Do your homework before signing a contract,” Stanley said.
Arriving at a resolution can be a long, expensive process. Disabled workers often must sue employers, who can later pursue vendors. It’s not feasible in many cases, Stanley said.
Advocacy groups are backing legislation that could bring clarity to digital accessibility requirements and put vendors on the hook, but the proposal remains in congressional limbo. Meanwhile, new European Union rules for digital accessibility require more accessible consumer tech, but don’t cover enterprise software.
Big employers that buy software may get better results, suggested Stanley, whose organisation consults with companies on accessibility.
"You can talk with your money,” she said. "If you refuse to buy inaccessible software, vendors will have to fix it.”
The fixes aren’t always quick.
Daniel Gutz, who worked on accessibility as a Google contractor from 2022 to 2025, said he encountered tickets at Google for addressing bugs that sometimes went unresolved for years.
"Tickets would just fall by the wayside and we would request updates and we wouldn’t get any traction,” he said. "People need to realise, you need to build accessible from the beginning because it's so hard to go in and retroactively fix things.”
Gutz, who is blind, aspires to work in cybersecurity but said he kept landing in accessibility roles because early career hurdles helped him develop an aptitude for it.
Getting pigeonholed
Chancey Fleet, a longtime blind technology educator and member of the NFB’s resolutions committee, said blind professionals are often pigeonholed at work, when they’re hired at all. The unemployment rate for blind Americans is double the national rate. In 2024, less than half of the millions of Americans with visual impairments participated in the labor force, compared with 75% overall.
Sam Hartman, a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has worked on federal defense projects and helped shape web standards. When he encounters software he can’t use because of his blindness, he tries different screen readers, switches between web browsers or even debugs code. His deep-systems knowledge goes back far. His father, an IBM programmer, built him a speech synthesiser before commercial screen readers even existed.
"I’m lucky,” he said. "Because I was involved from the beginning, I learned how it all worked under the covers.” But other blind employees can’t as easily code themselves out of an accessibility problem.
Lakrout said she left Unilever feeling demoralised. The kinds of tools that she said held her back are de facto requirements for many entry-level jobs, she noted. When they’re not fully accessible, it’s hard to advance.
"We talk about the glass ceiling; this is a steel ceiling and you cannot break through it,” she said.
Today, she’s reshaped her life around accessibility and empowerment. In addition to lobbying for legislation and consulting on disability advocacy, she leads ParaCliffHangers, an adaptive rock climbing nonprofit. But she no longer emails vendors about addressing their accessibility problems.
"I finally feel strong,” Lakrout said. "If I can rock climb, they can fix their software.” – Bloomberg
