Jesse Sookne
Jesse Sookne
Principal accessibility consultant and founder at Inclusive Tech Studio. Helping companies make their products work well for people with disabilities.
I help SaaS companies stop turning away customers by making their products work for the 26% of people who have a disability.
When I started working on accessibility at SAS Institute in 2014, I didn’t realize I had a disability myself.
Four years later, I listened to a speaker describe her experiences with anxiety, which mirrored mine, and label them a disability. Then, in 2020, I was diagnosed with ADHD.
I learned that these are invisible disabilities. I came to appreciate that they help me empathize with others and experience things differently.
I’ve since led accessibility at Roku, where each improvement we made positively affected millions of users.
I started Inclusive Tech Studio in 2024 to help SaaS companies make accessible products and win customers with disabilities.
Use these four principles as a map to accessibility
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines are full of rich insights into making digital things accessible. They're also lengthy -- with 86 separate requirements! -- and dense.
The way they're structured and organized though, is simple, easy to understand, and orients you toward making the things you create accessible to people with disabilities.
This talk is a lightning tour through their four core principles, known by the acronym POUR: Perceivable, Operable, Understandable, and Robust.