Disabled developers in the spotlight at GitHub
For Global Accessibility Awareness Day, GitHub is highlighting the work of developers with disabilities—people like Paul Chiou, who is paralyzed from the neck down and pursued a Ph.D. while building his own custom hardware and software. That lived experience drives his research in accessibility automation and gives him firsthand insight into the needs of other disabled users. Becky Tyler, a computer science student at the University of Dundee, started coding after discovering Minecraft; she now games, paints, livestreams, and writes code entirely with her eyes. Her professor, Dr. Annalu Waller, leads the Augmentative and Alternative Communication Research Group at Dundee and brings her own lived experience to her exacting standards for students with disabilities.
GitHub also profiles Anton Mirhorodchenko, who has difficulty speaking and typing and uses English as a second language. He has experimented with ChatGPT and GitHub Copilot to communicate, express ideas, and develop software from architecture through code creation, documenting his approach in a guide on using generative AI for development.
Accessibility work across GitHub's products
Beyond the profiles, GitHub points to recent accessibility improvements across its platform. The GitHub.com team shipped a redesigned primary navigation that was built with keyboard access in mind from the start, and the new code search experience is designed to work well with screen readers like NVDA. The contribution graph has also seen updates to remove barriers for keyboard-only and screen reader users. Site-wide color contrast improvements to both light and dark themes came courtesy of Primer, GitHub's design system, whose team documented the competing requirements they had to balance.
The npm team, meanwhile, completed an accessibility bug bash that removed hundreds of potential barriers from npmjs.com. GitHub's design organization has been working to build accessibility into its culture early in the development process, and the GitHub Copilot team shipped improvements for keyboard-only and screen reader users. GitHub Next also introduced Copilot Voice, an experiment in technical preview that lets developers code entirely hands-free using voice commands.
Giving back to the accessibility community
GitHub contributes its accessibility work back to the broader community. Primer's accessibility improvements are available for direct public use, and GitHub's accessibility team members—several of whom are disabled—have shared their internal processes. After a recent retrospective that one blind team member called the most accessible they'd attended, the team published its approach to inclusive retrospectives for others to adopt.
GitHub employees also give back through social giving events. A recent campaign raised more than $15,000 to support the Seeing Eye, far exceeding its $5,000 goal and enabling the naming of three guide dog puppies—the first of which is called Octo.
The road ahead
For GitHub, the accessibility program's success is measured by what developers with disabilities can contribute. The company sees its role as removing obstacles and celebrating those contributions, with more work planned. More details are available at accessibility.github.com.
