06 — Tap Target
"I Don't Test With Screen Readers. I Live Here."
Amara Osei is a senior mobile engineer who has been blind since twelve — she builds the interfaces she can't see, and reviews yours faster than you can. A conversation about VoiceOver at 700 words a minute, the myth of the accessibility sprint, and what teams get wrong on day one.
Amara Osei has shipped mobile apps for twelve years, the last six as a senior engineer. She is blind, codes with a screen reader at speeds that unsettle her sighted colleagues, and has become the person whole product orgs quietly route their apps through before launch. We spoke for an hour; her VoiceOver stayed on, as always, at 700 words per minute.
A conversation with Amara Osei
- Tap Target
You've said sighted developers test with screen readers the way tourists use phrasebooks. What's the difference between testing and living here?
- Amara Osei
Speed and trust. A tester turns VoiceOver on, swipes politely through every element in order, and concludes the screen works. I navigate by touch-exploring the layout in half a second, jumping by headings, using the rotor. A screen can pass the polite tour and be unusable at speed — no headings to jump between, actions buried five swipes deep, a layout that reshuffles on every visit so muscle memory never forms. Phrasebook tourists check the words exist. Residents notice the city has no street signs.
- Tap Target
What's the first thing you notice in an app, before any of the labels?
- Amara Osei
Whether the first focus lands somewhere sane. Open a screen and if focus drops onto a decorative image or a cookie banner's third paragraph, I know nobody who relies on this has ever opened it. It's the accessibility equivalent of a shop where the front door opens into a cupboard.
- Tap Target
Teams love the dedicated accessibility sprint. You don't.
- Amara Osei
The accessibility sprint is where accessibility goes to be congratulated and then deferred. One sprint a year produces a spreadsheet of three hundred issues, thirty get fixed, and the spreadsheet becomes the artifact everyone points at to prove they care. Compare that to the boring alternative: labels and focus order reviewed in every PR, like tests. Teams that do the second never need the first. The sprint isn't a commitment, it's a confession about the other fifty weeks.
- Tap Target
What's something genuinely getting better?
- Amara Osei
The default components. If a team builds from the platform's standard controls and resists the urge to hand-roll everything, they inherit most of the work free. Ten years ago accessible was something you built. Now, mostly, it's something you break — every custom tab bar and bespoke bottom sheet is someone opting out of work the platform already did. That reframe changes code review: the question isn't 'did you add accessibility', it's 'justify removing it'.
- Tap Target
One thing you'd have every designer do this week?
- Amara Osei
Write the screen as a sentence before you draw it. 'Search results, twenty items, each with a title, price, and add button.' That sentence is what I hear. If it's a good sentence, the screen is probably good. If you can't write it — if it's 'image, image, button, button, unlabeled button' — you've designed a poster, not an interface.
Ten years ago accessible was something you built. Now it's something you break.
— Amara Osei