Some news about Practical
by Matt May
Happy Monday! A bonus happy Canada Day to those who celebrate.
Practical Equity and Inclusion was formed a year ago last week. I’ve been writing this newsletter for the last eight months, did paid office hours for a while, and began doing client work around the beginning of 2024.
The one thing I have learned about myself in that time is that I am a terrible self-promoter. I arranged one inbound sales call. I did no cold calling. I still never built a website for Practical. And I never figured out how to package my services, much less market them. And yet… I met my billable-hours goal for the second quarter, using this one simple trick: through word of mouth, I signed one client that’s amounted to over 90% of my billable hours. So after about five months working together, we’ve decided to make it official.
As of last Friday, I am now Chief Technology Officer at aLayer, Inc.
*record scratch* Yup, that’s me. You’re probably wondering how I got into this situation.
I wasn’t even considering technical leadership, or for that matter being an employee again. But I did start my career as an engineer, and settled in at aLayer before they’d started building a prototype. I’ve written a little code, built some data visualizations, and done all manner of infrastructure work to set us up to grow from a half-dozen people to the right size to build what we want to put out into the world.
Our product is going into testing in the next few weeks. I think our idea has a lot of promise: the way I’d describe it is that we’re adapting web content to suit each individual’s cognitive profile. You could think of phase 1 as a supercharged reader mode. What we’ve found as we explore features is that, as with captions and dark mode, features disabled people need and accessibility folks take for granted are more broadly beneficial than many others expect. We’re going to use these tools and more to make the web more comprehensible. My role as CTO will include leading engineering, UX design and research, and operations going forward.
For most of my career, I’ve wondered what a software company could do if its tech leadership was a full-fledged partner in accessibility and inclusive design. Starting now, I’ll be finding out for myself. What we are building is not an accessibility tool per se, but I’m going to be hiring a team that values inclusion and accessibility, and we’re going to build a highly accessible product.
So, what happens at Practical? Functionally, nothing. I have no other business to unwind, so I don’t have any clients to let go. Practical will remain open to advise companies on product equity and inclusion strategy. If you need a board member or advisor, I invite you to get in touch. I will also stick with my weekly office hours, and this newsletter, which will stick to inclusive design and product equity rather than turn into an aLayer chronicle.
I’m hiring for an engineering lead and UX researcher/designer starting this week. I’ll post these listings in the next issue. (Unfortunately, I already have dozens of requests for informational interviews, so I’m not going to be able to do them at all, out of fairness for other candidates.)
I think there’s a lot of promise to what we’re doing. Whether I’m right, only time will tell.
Office hours
…are off for this week, due to this Thursday being Independence Day in the US. I may turn them off until I’ve filled my open positions to prevent people from jumping the queue.
Have a great week!