NASE: Building an Accessibility Tool for Real Users
A bilingual, screen-reader-friendly web tool for Malaysia’s National Association of Special Education: now actively used by people with disabilities, referenced in NASE’s own journal, and validated by direct testimonials from the disabled users it was built for.
This project was never for a portfolio. It was built for the National Association of Special Education (NASE) in Malaysia, and for an audience most of the web quietly forgets: people with visual impairments and other disabilities who rely on assistive technology to use a website at all.
That single fact rewrote every decision I would normally make on autopilot. When your real users navigate by keyboard, listen instead of read, and need high contrast just to perceive the screen, accessibility stops being a feature you sprinkle on at the end. It becomes the entire specification, the thing every other choice has to serve.
Over the next sessions I'll walk through how that audience shaped the build: the barriers I had to remove, how I engineered text-to-speech with synchronized highlighting, how four languages share one codebase, the high-contrast and scaling systems, keyboard and screen-reader support, what WCAG actually demanded in practice, and, most importantly, the real-world impact and what came back from the people who use it.
