Marcy Sutton

The accessibility expert and international speaker explains how pursuing a path that is aligned with her values has been key to career and personal fulfilment

- Tom May

If you’ve never met an accessibility specialist, you might imagine them to be severe and intimidating people, ready to pounce on the slightest transgression of accessibility standards in your web designs. Happily, in our experience, that’s far from the case. Almost everyone we’ve ever met in this sphere has been engaging, charming and just all-round nice – and web developer and accessibility advocate Marcy Sutton fits right in to that mould.

Currently living in Bellingham, Washington, and working as a senior frontend engineer at Deque (pronounced ‘Deecue’) Systems, which specialises in automated tools for testing the accessibility of websites, Sutton is a beacon of upbeat positivity and easy-going charm. And that’s no coincidence. Her sunny disposition, she says, is the direct result of her calling to accessibility. “I put in a lot of effort and energy, and in return I get back the world," she said with a smile.

New Career Path

But it’s a path she took a while to embark on. Originally, Sutton wanted to be a photojournalist. But she graduated her Visual Journalism BA, at California’s Brooks Institute of Photography, at a time when newspapers were closing, digital cameras were becoming ubiquitous, and the job market was disappearing fast. She’d enjoyed building websites since high school, so now she decided to go all in, taking an associate’s degree in Web Design and Multimedia at the Art Institute of Seattle. Soon after, she found her first job as a web developer at boutique Seattle shop DEI Creative.