A Small Font, A Big Barrier: The Invisible Labor of Accessibility

In October 2025, I wrote a LinkedIn newsletter article about a very small font. Literally. That was the problem.

I was working in Google Sheets, which I use extensively as part of my job, and struggling to read the formula bar. I have a visual impairment, and while I can change the font size inside spreadsheet cells, I can't independently increase the size of the text displayed in the formula bar. Browser zoom makes the formula bar larger, but it also makes everything else larger, reducing the amount of the spreadsheet I can see at once.

Technically, I can still use Google Sheets, but that word, technically, is doing a tremendous amount of work.

When Access Exists, But It Costs More

I already compensate for the way magnification affects my work in other ways. I work exclusively from a MacBook, and because my magnification is turned up high enough for me to read comfortably, I see a much smaller portion of the screen than someone using standard settings. Even with +7 computer glasses, simply making everything smaller isn't a reasonable solution.

When I considered asking my employer for a larger laptop, I knew the price difference between MacBook models would make that a disproportionately expensive accommodation for what I was actually trying to accomplish. So I found another solution: a screen extender with two additional displays that clip onto my laptop and connect through USB-C.

Now I have three screens, and it's a fantastic accommodation. It doesn't fix my vision, nor does it need to. It changes my environment so the way I see doesn't interfere as much with my ability to work. The additional screen real estate gives back some of what magnification takes away.

That's very different from what happens when I encounter something like the Google Sheets formula bar. There, the environment won't change in the specific way I need it to, so the burden of compensating for that limitation shifts back to me.

Disabled People Get Really Fucking Good at Workarounds

When I originally went looking for a solution to the formula bar problem, the suggestions I found were variations on things disabled people hear all the time.

Zoom your browser.

Use a magnifier.

Copy the text somewhere else.

Edit it in another application.

Change your workflow.

Technically, those are solutions. If my only question is, Is there some sequence of actions through which Tabby can eventually accomplish the task?, then congratulations. We've solved accessibility.

Except we haven't.

Suppose I'm editing a large spreadsheet containing social media content. I click into a cell, struggle to read the formula bar, zoom in, do what I need to do, zoom back out so I can see enough of the spreadsheet to understand where I am, move to the next thing, and eventually encounter the same problem again. Or I copy the content into another application where I can comfortably read and edit it, then copy it back into Sheets and resume my original task.

None of those individual actions is particularly difficult, and that's precisely why this kind of accessibility problem is so easy to dismiss. The cost is distributed across dozens or hundreds of tiny interruptions: a few seconds here, another adjustment there, a little more concentration, another context switch, another moment of visual strain.

Every workaround interrupts the thing I was actually trying to do and replaces it, temporarily, with the task of making my tool usable. Then I have to get my brain back to where it was before the interruption. That's not nothing.

The Workaround Can Hide the Barrier

There's a particularly frustrating paradox here. Disabled people often become so skilled at compensating for inaccessible environments that our success can make the barriers disappear from everyone else's view.

Imagine that I spend twenty extra minutes manipulating an interface, moving information between applications, changing zoom settings, or otherwise compensating for something that wasn't designed to accommodate my vision. You don't see any of that. You see the finished spreadsheet. From the outside, the system worked: I was given a task, I used the software, and I produced the expected result. The evidence of the accessibility problem has disappeared inside the extra labor I performed to overcome it.

The better I become at compensating, the easier it becomes to conclude that I don't need accommodation, which is a really fucked-up incentive structure.

It also makes me wonder how much invisible labor disabled people perform every day without even recognizing it as labor anymore. When you've spent your life figuring out how to navigate things that weren't designed around your body or brain, adaptation becomes automatic. You change the setting, take a different route, bring the thing you know won't be provided, sit in the particular place, use the extension, copy the text somewhere else, schedule around the limitation, or develop an elaborate little system that works so well you eventually forget other people don't need a system at all.

Until one day someone asks why you're doing it that way.

Possible and Accessible Are Not the Same Thing

This is where I've changed my thinking slightly since writing the original LinkedIn article. At the time, I wrote:

“That's not accessibility. That's a workaround.”

I still agree with the sentiment, but I think the reality is more complicated. Accessibility standards have to establish measurable requirements. The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, or WCAG, include criteria around resizing text, and browser zoom can be a legitimate accessibility technique. There are good reasons for that. Accessibility can't mean every individual interface behaves exactly the way every individual disabled person would prefer.

But technical accessibility and usable accessibility aren't identical. The World Wide Web Consortium distinguishes accessibility from usability for a reason. A product can provide mechanisms that technically allow a disabled person to access its functionality while still requiring that person to navigate considerably more friction than other users.

So I'd rewrite my original sentence now:

A workaround can provide access without providing an accessible experience.

The distinction matters because otherwise we end the accessibility conversation as soon as someone demonstrates that the task is technically possible.

Can you enlarge it somehow?

Yes.

Can you access the information?

Yes.

Can you complete your work?

Yes.

Then what's the problem? The problem is everything contained inside those yeses.

Sometimes the Environment Is What Makes Me More Disabled

There's another reason the tiny formula bar has stuck with me. It's a remarkably simple demonstration of something much larger about disability.

My vision doesn't suddenly deteriorate when I click into the formula bar. I'm the same person, using the same eyes, wearing the same glasses, sitting in front of the same computer. I can comfortably read text I've enlarged elsewhere in the spreadsheet. Then I move into one part of the interface where I can't make the same adjustment, and suddenly the interaction between my vision and the environment creates a barrier.

The World Health Organization describes disability partly in terms of exactly this interaction between a person's health condition and environmental factors. An inaccessible environment can hinder someone's full participation. This doesn't mean my visual impairment disappears if everything is designed accessibly. My eyes are still my eyes. But the degree to which my vision interferes with what I'm trying to accomplish can change dramatically depending on the environment around me.

My three-screen setup demonstrates the same thing in the opposite direction. I didn't change my body to make it better at using a standard workspace. I changed the workspace, and suddenly I was less limited.

That distinction matters to me because disabled people are so often handed the responsibility for making ourselves compatible with the world as it already exists. We adapt ourselves to the software, the building, the schedule, the workplace, the communication method, or the process. Sometimes the better question is why the environment is so inflexible in the first place.

Accessibility Has a Cognitive Cost, Too

Visual accessibility sounds like it should be about vision. Mobility accessibility sounds like it should be about movement. Hearing accessibility sounds like it should be about hearing.

Bodies aren't organized into neat product-development categories.

Every time I stop what I'm doing to compensate for something I can't comfortably see, I'm also using attention. I have to remember where I was, manipulate the interface, solve the immediate accessibility problem, and return to the original task. If I'm already holding several pieces of information in working memory, that interruption can knock one of them loose. Now the visual barrier has created cognitive load.

The same thing happens in other forms of disability. A physical barrier can create a time cost. A communication barrier can require additional concentration. An inaccessible process can create planning work before the actual work even begins. This is part of what gets lost when accessibility is reduced to a checkbox asking whether someone can technically complete a task.

Two people can arrive at exactly the same destination while spending dramatically different amounts of energy getting there, and that difference matters.

“But Accessibility Helps Everyone”

In my original LinkedIn article, I made an argument I've made many times before:

“Disability isn't a niche concern. It's the one community that any of us could join at any time.”

I understand why I wrote it. I still think there's truth in it. Disability is part of the human experience, and bodies change. Illness happens. Accidents happen. People age. Accessibility designed today may become personally important to someone who has never thought of themselves as disabled.

There's also the familiar argument from universal design: accessibility improvements often benefit people far beyond the population they were originally intended to serve. Curb cuts help wheelchair users, but they also help people pushing strollers or pulling luggage. Captions help Deaf and hard-of-hearing people, but they're also useful when you can't hear a video over the noise around you.

These are good arguments, but I'm increasingly uncomfortable with how often we need them. Why do I need to convince you to care about accessibility by asking you to imagine that you might become disabled someday? Why does an accessibility feature become easier to justify when I can identify enough nondisabled people who will benefit from it too?

The World Health Organization estimates that around 1.3 billion people, roughly one in six people globally, experience significant disability.

We don't have to invoke hypothetical future disabled people.

We're already here.

Accessibility Doesn't Need a Secondary Beneficiary

I don't want to throw away universal design. Designing flexible environments that work for more people is objectively useful, and the fact that accessibility improvements frequently produce unexpected benefits is one of the strongest arguments for involving disabled people in design from the beginning.

But I want to separate this benefits everyone from this is therefore worth doing. Those aren't the same statement.

A curb cut would still be worth building if nobody ever pushed a stroller over it. Captions would still matter if nobody ever watched a video in a noisy restaurant. Adjustable text would still matter if the only people who used it were people who couldn't comfortably read the default.

Disabled people don't need to generate additional value for everyone else to justify being included.

That idea feels increasingly connected to other things I've been thinking about while revisiting what it means to be a Non-Standard Human. We have a strange tendency to make difference prove its usefulness. The neurodivergent trait becomes easier to celebrate when we can call it a superpower. The disabled person becomes inspirational when they accomplish something extraordinary. The accessibility feature becomes a brilliant example of design when we discover nondisabled people like it too. There is always a receipt, and I don't think access should have to produce one.

The Small Font Was Never Really the Point

I still want Google to let me change the font size in the Sheets formula bar. As of this writing, I haven't found evidence that the option has been added, and I found public requests from users describing essentially the same problem going back to at least 2019. That's seven years of people explaining that enlarging the entire browser isn't the same thing as being able to comfortably read one specific part of the interface.

But this isn't really an article about Google Sheets anymore. It's about all the little places where access technically exists while the burden of creating it has been transferred to the person who needs it. It's about how good people become at absorbing that labor, how easily successful compensation can hide the problem that required compensation in the first place, and the difference between saying you can get there and asking what it costs you to arrive.

I don't need every environment to be designed specifically for me. That's neither possible nor what accessibility means. I do want the people designing our environments, physical and digital, to recognize that flexibility matters because humans vary, and the “standard” person they're designing around isn't nearly as standard as we like to pretend.

Sometimes accessibility really is a ramp, an interpreter, a screen reader, or a major architectural change. And sometimes it's just letting me make the fucking font bigger.

The size of the fix doesn't determine the size of the barrier.

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