You will be able to use my apps. I'm not asking.

Here is a promise, and I want it in writing so I can't wriggle out of it later: every app I release will have every accessibility option that makes sense for that app. Not “on the roadmap.” Not “planned for a future update,” which is the phrase companies use when they mean never. Done, tested, and in the build before I let myself call the thing finished.

This isn't a values statement. Values statements are what companies frame and hang in the lobby. This is closer to a threat, mostly aimed at myself.

Why I Care This Much

I'm autistic. I don't lead with that for sympathy. I lead with it because it's the reason this post exists.

If you're not, here's the short version of what software is like: a lot of it is a series of small fights you didn't sign up for. The video that starts playing by itself. The animation you can't turn off that makes a settings screen feel like a boat. The notification sound somebody picked because it was fun. The button that is a slightly different gray rectangle from the other gray rectangles, and you're expected to just know. Text you can make bigger, after which the layout gives up and hides the thing you were looking for. None of it is malicious. All of it adds up, and by the end of a day I've spent a real amount of energy just absorbing other people's design decisions.

I've spent my whole life adapting to software. I'm not going to make anyone adapt to mine.

And here's the part that surprises people: most of that isn't what developers picture when they hear “accessibility.” They picture screen readers, and they should, and mine work with them. But accessibility is also not making me flinch. It's letting me turn the motion off. It's not playing a sound I didn't ask for. It's a dark mode that was designed rather than generated. It's an app that doesn't need me to be at my best to use it, because I'm frequently not.

“Every Option Possible” Means Thinking, Not A Checklist

I want to be precise about the promise, because “fully accessible” is a phrase that gets stamped on things that aren't.

I'm not working from a checklist. A checklist is what you use when you want to say you did something. It's tidy and it's tweetable, and I don't tweet, so that's out. What I do instead is sit down with each app and ask a harder question: who is going to have a bad time with this, and why?

The answer is different every time, which is the point.

• PennyTV lives on a television. That means a remote, a ten-foot screen, and a focus ring you can spot from the sofa without squinting — not a hairline outline the same color as the wallpaper. Captions. Reduced motion. Nothing that autoplays because it decided you'd gone quiet.
• Transcribbler turns speech into text. It is, by its nature, an accessibility tool. If a transcription app didn't work with VoiceOver from end to end, that wouldn't be embarrassing. It would be a punchline.
• Chewsy is swiping through restaurants. Swiping is a gesture. Some people can't do gestures, or can't do them reliably, or are using a switch. So there are buttons. There are always buttons.
• Kirby is email, which means people live in it for hours. Every single thing has to work from the keyboard. Text has to get bigger without the layout collapsing. Contrast has to be real, not “looks fine on my monitor.”
• SpoonBudget exists for people who get a limited amount of energy each day. If the app for tracking your spoons costs you spoons, I have made something actively rude.
• Eat Safely In Florida is thousands of health inspection results. A screen reader needs a real table with real headers, not forty divs in a trench coat pretending to be one.

Some of those are shipped. Some aren't yet. The standard applies to all of them anyway. It's the standard, not a feature I'll add if there's time.

What This Looks Like In Practice

I'm one person. There's no accessibility team to hand this to. There's me, usually late, going through my own app with the screen curtain on, saying “no. No. Absolutely not.” at a button I built with my own hands earlier that day.

It's more work. It's also the part of the job I mind the least, because it's the part that makes the thing worth shipping. Nobody in the history of software has ever written in to complain that an app was too easy to use.

Here's the rule I hold myself to: if there is someone who can't use an app of mine, it isn't finished. I don't care if it's in the store. It isn't finished. I would rather ship late than ship something rude.

If Something Doesn't Work For You

Tell me. Genuinely. If any app of mine fights you — a control you can't reach, a contrast that isn't, a sound that shouldn't be there — raise a ticket. It comes to me, because there is nobody else for it to come to. I'll be annoyed, but at myself, and then I'll fix it.

And if you use assistive tech of any kind and want early builds, I would honestly love to have you on the beta crew. You'll find things I can't, and I'd rather hear it from you than from a one-star review.