Accessibility as Community Service: Fixing the Digital Curb-Cuts of Akron

Akron knows what a locked door costs.

Not the kind with a deadbolt. The kind where the sidewalk ends at the curb and doesn’t come back down. The kind where the ramp doesn’t exist, the sign is too small, the form won’t load on a phone. The kind of locked door that doesn’t announce itself — it just quietly keeps people out while everyone else walks through without noticing.

That’s what a broken website is to someone using a screen reader. Not an inconvenience. A locked door.

At belt.works, we don’t do locked doors.

What accessibility actually means

Digital accessibility is the practice of making sure websites and tools work for everyone — including people with visual, auditory, motor, or cognitive disabilities.

It means a blind veteran can read the local food pantry schedule. It means a senior with tremors can navigate a housing application without a mouse. It means the community org that worked for years to build trust in this neighborhood doesn’t accidentally exclude the people it’s trying to serve because nobody checked whether the contrast ratio was readable.

The curb-cut is the right metaphor. It was designed for wheelchair users. It also helps the parent with the stroller, the delivery worker with the cart, the kid on a bike. Good access infrastructure doesn’t pick its beneficiaries. It just works for more people.

What A11y means

You’ll see the term A11y used in this work. It’s a numeronym — eleven letters between the A and the Y in “accessibility,” collapsed into a number for efficiency. It traces back to the 1980s at Digital Equipment Corporation, where engineers were doing the hard work of making software inclusive before the modern web existed. It wasn’t a brand. It was a shorthand built by builders, for builders.

That lineage matters. This is not new work. People have been arguing for it, building toward it, and getting ignored about it for forty years.

Why it isn’t optional

There is a persistent idea in tech that accessibility is a finishing layer — something you bolt on at the end if the budget holds. It isn’t. Accessibility is the quality of the base code. If the foundation is wrong, no amount of polish fixes it.

When the infrastructure people depend on for housing, food, and community resources excludes twenty percent of the population, that is not an oversight. It is a failure. Semantic HTML isn’t extra credit. It’s the minimum. It’s the digital equivalent of making sure the door opens.

We’d rather say it plainly: if you are building tools for people in crisis, accessibility is a moral obligation. The technical argument is also the human argument. They are the same argument.

Why we audit for free

Every morning at 4:00 AM, our automated mesh starts auditing Akron-based community resource sites. We are not scoring them for a report. We are looking for barriers — missing alt text, broken keyboard navigation, contrast that fails in daylight, forms that don’t work on a phone.

When we find them, we reach out and offer to fix them. No charge for nonprofits and mutual aid organizations. No red tape.

Akron does not have a deep bench of developers who specialize in this work. That is not a criticism — it is just true. Accessibility expertise is scarce here. We are filling the gap because we can, and because we’d rather see a food bank spend its budget on food than on an ARIA label we can patch in an hour.

Who this is for

The seniors looking for stable housing through BoomMates.

The neighbors sharing tools and time on ShopFloor.

Every person in this city who needs to access community resources without the technology getting in the way.

We are not doing this to build a portfolio. We are doing it because the digital infrastructure of this city belongs to the people who live here, and right now parts of it are broken in ways most people never notice — because most people don’t have to.

We notice. We fix things. That's the work.

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belt.works · Akron, Ohio