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Comment by KeitIG | Hacker News Reader

As a front-end developer, accessibility has always been a way for me to describe to non-technical people what I actually do for a living.

Saying: "I build web applications" means nothing to them, and saying "I create website" makes you look like a wizard doing some black magic.

But saying "my job is to make websites accessible to everyone: we are used to use a screen and a mouse, but what if you are blind or deaf? Those people should not be allowed to go on any website? My role is to make those people able to browse the web, as you and me" give them an example of what kind of problems you actually solve as a web developer.

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> Saying: "I build web applications" means nothing to them, and saying "I create website" makes you look like a wizard doing some black magic.

Who are these people? When people ask what I do I just tell them "I'm a developer; I make websites" and they understand what I do enough to move the conversation forward. Is there other context I'm missing?

There's a difference between informing someone of your job title (serviceable smalltalk) and actually telling them what you do (likely reserved for a conversation with someone who's demonstrated some interest)

In France, roughly 12% of people don't use the Internet - https://www.arcep.fr/uploads/tx_gspublication/State-Of-Inter...

In Indonesia, millions of people say that they don't use the Internet - but they do use Facebook - https://qz.com/333313/milliions-of-facebook-users-have-no-id...

For all of us, it's worth stepping out of our bubble to see how other people perceive what we take for granted.

Those are really interesting statistics. Would be a good idea to look those up before traveling on business

Who are these people?

The other 98% of the world.

Context probably matters. Those "in the working world" are likely somehow familiar; others perhaps far less so.

That's a pretty good way of communicating. I need to start changing "I write web servers" to "I make sure our customers, who are frequently in the middle of nowhere, can interact with the services we offer."

But those two statements seem to me to be very different. The first would make you a web backend developer and the other more of a network engineer or sysadmin. I know this probably isn't too different for many people, but those people won't probably be able to imagine a specific job if given either description.

I don't want to be just negative, so I'd like to suggest an alternative: "I make parts of computer programs, like <names of well-known products that are similar to ones you make>". This will be easily understandable to everyone who knows what computer programs are and also won't be misleading. You could also add "for the internet" somewhere if that part is important.

While the roles certainly overlap, frontend dev and accessiblity for me have become separate roles. The level of knowledge and expertise just too much in each.

If you're able to pull it off, that's impressive.

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