A few weeks ago, while driving around listening to podcasts, I came across one where they were discussing great documentaries. I immediately turned the radio up, as the documentary is one of my favorite genres of film. This particular podcast mentioned a documentary on Netflix called “The Remarkable Life of Ibelin,” and was described by the host as a bunch of friends recreating a late friend's life from his time playing World of Warcraft.

This description really caught my attention and as soon as I possibly could, I dug up the film on Netflix that described this documentary as “The secret life of a young World of Warcraft gamer is vividly reimagined when his online friends contact his family after his death.” There were going to be more details about a secret life. I was intrigued. I started the viewing.

This documentary is about Mads, a young man diagnosed with a form of muscular dystrophy that limited his mobility greatly, eventually confining him to a wheelchair. At a young age, his parents allowed him to explore the world of computer gaming, where he became an avid gamer. Mads found World of Warcraft, eventually becoming a long-standing member of a guild. This membership was unknown to his parents who thought he lived a lonely and isolated life.

After many years of illness, Mads succumbed. His parents wanted to let the people who read his blog (https://musingslif.blogspot.com/) know that he had passed, figuring a few dozen people read his blog. Little did they know, it was in the hundreds of thousands. In the blog post, they put their personal email and almost immediately after posting it, the emails flooded in, expressing sympathy for their loss. What surprised them was how many people expressed how Mads had affected their lives in so many ways. His parents were astonished and wanted to learn more, so much more, about their son's life.

You might ask how the documentarians knew how Mads participated in this community. Mads' WoW character was named Iberlin and was part of guild. This guild had many forms of communication but most importantly, it had a chat system where they kept logs of the chats. It was this chat history that helped present a bigger picture of Mads' life. You see, these logs were vast, something along the lines of 40,000 pages. It was with these chats that the documentarians were able to recreate conversations Mads had with other guild members, all of whom were close friends with the young man in a wheelchair in Denmark.

This documentary was a Venn diagram of many of my interests. It had gaming, it had movies, it had technology (Mads used a special controller), and it had accessibility. It was this last topic that really hit home with me. Because of accessibility, a person who had a major positive impact on other people's lives was able to be part of a community.

I think the reason that this documentary really stuck with me is that, just a few months back, I finished a very large accessibility project, and I can tell you, it's not as trivial as it seems. You can't just run your website through Lighthouse, get a decent score, and expect it to be accessible. There are many forms of disability that need to be addressed. Some people are vision impaired, some are cognitively impaired, some have difficulty hearing, and some have physical limitations. No two people are affected in the same way. In each and every one of these cases, there are ways to help their lives be better, but it takes work and determination.

At the end of the day, the value that we receive from making things accessible is unmeasurable and that's where this documentary really hit me. I could see how important accessibility work is and how making software accessible for people enables them and other people to benefit in untold ways.

This is why I want to turn it around on us. We are software developers and engineers and need to make our software as accessible as we possibly can. There are benefits that we will all potentially achieve where we wouldn't have otherwise.

If you want to get started on learning about accessibility, check out these articles in CODE Magazine from fellow author Ashley Lodge:

But that's not all. Check out:

That's just to get you started. There are others who focus on accessibility in software development as well (although Ashleigh is our favorite). Just do a quick search and you'll come up with loads of good advice.