Accessibility Journey: From Casino Dealer to Code Champion

Julia Undeutsch's path to becoming an accessibility specialist defies conventional career trajectories. From studying musicology and Japanese while working as a poker dealer to becoming a passionate advocate for digital inclusion, her story reveals how diverse experiences shape innovative approaches to accessibility.

When Julia first encountered coding, she noticed something peculiar on Stack Overflow: developers often presented two solutions—a standard approach and an "accessible" alternative. Her immediate reaction speaks volumes: "Why would I choose one or the other? You always choose accessibility." This clarity of purpose has defined her work ever since, recognizing that accessible code inherently represents better quality and cleaner development practices.

Julia's linguistic background provides a fascinating foundation for her accessibility work. Having studied Japanese and Austrian Sign Language, she draws direct parallels between human languages and programming languages. Both require similar cognitive processes and serve as gateways to understanding different cultures and perspectives—skills that translate perfectly to creating inclusive digital experiences that work for diverse users.

Beyond her day job at Atos, Julia has become a community builder extraordinaire. Through the Google Developer Expert Program and Women Techmakers, she's created platforms to spread accessibility awareness globally. Her talks in Japan revealed a hunger for accessibility knowledge in places where it hadn't yet become mainstream. Alongside her "partner in crime" Laura, she's building Vienna's accessibility community by combining web development expertise with UX research.

What makes Julia's perspective particularly valuable are the real-world lessons from her poker dealer days—experiences that unknowingly introduced her to accessibility challenges. Whether accommodating a player with prosthetic arms who couldn't reach cards at a specially designed table or navigating rules about "English only" when a deaf player needed sign language, these moments forced her to consider fundamental questions about inclusion that continue to inform her work today.

Ready to learn from Julia's unique journey and gain fresh perspectives on accessibility? Tune in to hear how diverse backgrounds and passionate advocacy are reshaping digital inclusion for everyone.

Chapters

• 0:01 Julia's Unconventional Journey
• 6:10 From Languages to Code Accessibility
• 10:02 Community Building & Global Impact
• 16:12 Partnering for Accessibility Innovation
• 19:10 Inclusion in Gaming & Real-World Lessons
• 27:32 Final Reflections on Human Experience

Transcript

Neil Milliken: 0:01

Hello and AXSChat to . I'm delighted that we're joined today by Julia Undeutsch and I'm exercising my right to indulge in a little bit of nepotism here, because Julia works for me on the Atos accessibility team, although she's not working at the moment because she's on maternity leave. But one of the reasons that I really wanted to feature Yulia for a long time now is that she does an awful lot of work outside of the day job and so and I think that Yulia's journey into accessibility and this is something we always love talking about on Access Chat was also interesting. So, Yulia, welcome. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your interesting journey? Because you started as a linguist and then took up a different language, the JavaScript. So, yeah, please tell us all about yourself.

Julia Undeutsch: 0:56

Thank you. Thank you for welcoming me so nicely. Yeah, hello, my name is Julia, I'm based in Austria, vienna, and I'm currently working at Arthas as an accessibility specialist for web development and UX design. And yes, as I mentioned, I had a completely different journey before that, because I was studying musicology and Japanese studies.

Julia Undeutsch: 1:16

While working as a poker dealer in a casino, I started to learn how to code and I would say, how I came to the topic of accessibility was that when I started to learn how to code and go to Stack Overflow, for example, to learn about different issues and how to overcome them while developing applications, I always realized that the answers were like yeah, you can code it like this, but if you want to make it accessible, you can also code it like this. And I thought why are there two different parts? Why would I choose one or the other? And for me, it didn't make sense to choose the other one. You always choose the accessibility, the accessible one, because this was also a very clean code and good code quality. So it's about so much more than accessibility in general, but also for good code quality To become a very good developer. This was my priority to write the best code out there which is by default accessible.

Neil Milliken: 2:12

Excellent. So I've always liked finding people to work with that have unconventional backgrounds. So yours was definitely unconventional backgrounds and I like that enthusiasm. I know Deborah's got a question and then maybe we'll go into your extracurricular activities afterwards.

Debra Ruh: 2:33

Yes, you know, recently on air we have interviewed people, as Neil's saying, with these interesting backgrounds, and Neil was telling me, before you came on air, he was telling me that you sort of traded learning Japanese to learning JavaScript and I just it's such a it's funny to say that, but actually on the episode we were recording yesterday with a different woman, some of this stuff came up too, and just the using the languages because that they are languages, and just using the languages because they are languages. But I think a lot of people don't think about it from that, because I sometimes feel like what's my words? A dumb American, because I only speak one language, english, barely speak that one. But at the same time, but I did learn a language, a German language, and I coded for six years, and so I was like, oh, all right, cool, I'm going to take that. But I do think that is so interesting.

Debra Ruh: 3:31

And so my question would be why did you shift into the accessibility from the? Obviously you're a brilliant woman, the way you know, only because to understand languages it's it really uses a lot of different parts of your brain. So I was just also curious if you would go a little bit further in the story of how you got here.

Julia Undeutsch: 3:52

True, yeah, totally. Actually, I really love to learn. I'm kind of bored if I cannot learn something new and I think languages are really interesting. Board, if I cannot learn something new and I think languages are really interesting Back then, when I studied musicology, for example, we have to do also some extracurricular and there Austrian Sign Language got my interest because I thought, wow, how cool is that.

Julia Undeutsch: 4:18

I didn't even have a connection to Austrian Sign Language or to anyone who is there for something, but this was so interesting to me to learn a different language and I thought, okay, I can do it as a hobby or I have to have my credits for the university, but I always was interested in different languages and also, you can understand culture better, I would say when learning Japanese, for example, then I think if you want to understand the people, then you have to learn their language, would be my opinion. Yeah, and with programming it's quite the same. It's hard, as I heard, and I was interested, first of all, how the web works and how to write all this stuff, and I think for me it's always so interesting. How can people be so smart and writing code and stuff? And, yeah, this is just. This is also what got me into becoming a poker dealer, when I saw the people working and I thought, yeah, they're so smart, they're so fast, they can calculate so fast. And I was. I want to do the same, I want to learn it. And then it was also the reason why I started to do a course and then I was a poker dealer from one day to another.

Debra Ruh: 5:21

I love it from one day to another. That's so interesting and you bring such interesting synergies to it that I haven't thought about.

Neil Milliken: 5:31

So thank you. I also spent an early career in gambling. It's not something I actually enjoyed very much. I worked in a betting shop and had to do bet settling and taking bets on the horse racing and stuff. Terrible job for me as a dyslexic, having to do mental calculations and bet settling, so maybe not as enjoyable as being a croupier. But one of the things, as I said, that also got me interested in bringing you into the team was the fact that you were doing voluntary activities around accessibility even before coming into the team. So I know we're going to interview your pal Laura shortly. I look forward to that.

Julia Undeutsch: 6:19

But maybe tell us a bit about the extracurricular activities, because you know you you're, you know people, code, you're busy engaging in community building and all this kind of stuff, so let's hear about it yeah, when I remember right, I first started in 2020 when I learned how to code, to write the first blog posts and on devto and, I think, writing many blog posts, also, most likely about accessibility. They also realized my engagement in the community. It wasn't even my intention to do so. It just happens. Everything just happens. It's never my intention to do anything. It's weird, but I just do it because I love it, especially already in the beginning, like the DefTO community, they recognized my engagement and they asked me to become not a part, but you have a little bit better status on FTO, to be eligible to vote for other blog posts or something like this. So this was already very encouraging for me that people see how much I do care about other people, motivate them, for example, to also write blog posts and stuff like this, because my posts also were about how to get into development If you're a woman, if you don't know how to code, if you have a totally different career before that. And, yeah, I think I got noticed for this stuff in my early days as a developer.

Julia Undeutsch: 7:48

And then I heard about this GDE program, the Google Developer Group program and the expert program and I also wanted to be part of it, because I thought being part of such a big community could also help spread more awareness about accessibility, even though accessibility itself is not a topic they are more like. If you're an Android developer or for a chrome developer, then you have to apply for this specific part applied for web applications. But I made it very clear that I'm only interested in xsc and they loved it. So they had two or three interviews and they loved it and they said, okay, let's do it. And now I'm also part of the Google Developer Expert Program, which also brought me to and now I do my own webinar series, a monthly series about accessibility and web development from the very beginning and also to progress as a developer, as a designer, as a QA tester, how you can improve yourself, because we know that in companies it's often not that easy in development groups to be active in accessibility if the other team members don't care about it.

Julia Undeutsch: 8:58

This is what I do, for example, through the community, the Google Developer community, and this also gave me the opportunity to be part of other Google Developer groups because they are spread around the world, and last year I made a trip to Japan and then Dara held my three talks about accessibility in Japan and they were really interested in it. So accessibility was not a topic at all for them. So inclusion and accessibility was like wow, they never heard about it and they're so interested in it. And I can say we were three people talking at this evening and my lane of questions afterwards was very long. I could not eat anything from the buffet, but okay. So they really cared about this topic. I was so surprised. I thought mine would be the most interesting one because it was an introduction to accessibility, and the other one was how to use flutter and AI and Gemini and stuff like this. And I came up with this how to get into accessibility. But they were really interested and I like that.

Julia Undeutsch: 9:55

That there's communities around the world and being also at GDE makes it easier for me to get into these communities and to hold talks everywhere around the world. And then also from the Google program, they have the Women Techmakers. This is what I started this year from the Google program to have the Women Techmakers. This is what I started this year getting the women here in Vienna and also, of course, worldwide, when I keep it in English and also online, making the community big again, because they stopped doing stuff here in Vienna because of COVID. I reactivated it this year and planning for my first live event. Yeah, I'm planning and planning, and then I want to do a bar camp for accessibility inclusion this autumn, and then there's the World Usability Day and so many things we can do and I find sleep and I find time for my baby, but this is also important and I just do it.

Neil Milliken: 10:41

So I was joking with one of our colleagues who's returned from maternity recently that he must have hit the new baby lottery because you've got a nice quiet one that sleeps and enables you to do stuff. So some of the others haven't hit that same lottery, but yeah, it's amazing the amount of things you're engaged with, and I know that Vienna is also home to Xero Conference and the Edsel Foundation, and so that was the first time that we met in person. You got to meet a lot of other team members and a lot of other people in the community. Obviously, I only come once a year. Is there a sort of vibrant accessibility community in Vienna, or is that something you're trying to rekindle because it died out during COVID?

Julia Undeutsch: 11:33

Yes, I don't think that there is or was a real accessibility community here, but this is something I would say Laura and I are currently working on that we are getting big in the community.

Neil Milliken: 11:45

And for people that don't know, because we haven't interviewed her yet, who's Laura?

Julia Undeutsch: 11:51

Laura is my dear friend and we're working on every topic related to accessibility and also women in tech. She also studied Japanese studies with me, but we did not really connect there. But afterwards, I think it was over LinkedIn when she realized that I do something about accessibility and she started also doing UX design and and caring about accessibility, and then we connected over linkedin and this is how we became partners in crime and talking every day, improving every day, and it's a very good combination. I think it's good that we are only two, because the more people in a group maybe it's not that good, and we we are very similar, so we work hard. There's no time you cannot text me after 12 am or something like this. We can text each other anytime and always encourage each other, motivate each other. And since we use our hardware and UX research mostly for the blind and I do the web development part, this is a very good combination, I think, and also very interesting for conferences. So we did already talk together because, yeah, we can combine these two things so good.

Neil Milliken: 12:58

Yes, so we all need partners in crime, don't we Debra?

Debra Ruh: 13:03

Yes, and what is Laura's last name? Missy, I look to interviewing her and I understand having friends like that. You know, as Neil said, you know, neil and I've been friends for so many years and you need people that you support. You know what you want to do. But I also do want to say, as you talked about your, all of those activities, and I think that's your soul talking to you. Sometimes it gets in you and you can't stop it, and that's what I've experienced, my career, and I know Neil probably the same way. Yeah, people might not always pay me for the work I do, but I really believe in the work. I believe that we really need to keep bringing us all together, like you're doing. So I really appreciate the efforts you and Laura are making to do that too.

Neil Milliken: 13:50

We all have our part to play, that's true, I think once you've got the bug, it's very difficult to get it out of your system. It's great when we have the enthusiasm that you encountered in Japan, but, as you know, sometimes day to day you can encounter quite a bit of resistance and it can be a bit of a grind, and so there come times when people are really tired and think, oh, do I really want to do this again? But we all keep coming back because there's something about it that means that we stick with it. Now you've got a bit of time, maybe depending on baby uh, to do a few things. Do the side projects have a think? So what are the? What are the things that you're excited to learn about? We're in a time of huge technological change, lots of new stuff coming on, lots of potential for inclusion. What are the things that, um, you want to dive into and learn?

Julia Undeutsch: 14:54

There would be so many things, but I'm always stuck on doing the organizational stuff, so it's hard for me to improve in knowledge. I think it would be important to learn more about AI and all this stuff I think also for the future jobs. I hope I also find time to learn about these things more, maybe the new things where you can similar a whole developer team. This would be very interesting to work with it. I did not try it out yet, but I heard about it and yeah, I guess this would be also what we should learn more about AI, become more comfortable working with AI and these things, if you want.

Neil Milliken: 15:35

So AI is a fairly common topic on Access Chat these days and we see lots of areas where it's helping to create new assistive technologies, but there's also areas where we have real concerns about the foundational data that it's built upon and how that because it's reflecting the biases in society that it may have an amplifying effect on some of those issues. So it's definitely a double-edged sword, but we need to know about it, as you said. Deborah, I know you've got a question.

Debra Ruh: 16:08

And Debra, I know you've got a question you know there's some things happening in our field, say in the United States and other countries, mainly in the US, where big amounts of people are getting let go, that we're doing this work, accessibility and DEI and things like that. Here in my country I've really been. We have October coming up all of us, of course and here in the United States it's NADEM, which is our National Disability Employment Awareness Month, and one thing that I'm seeing so much chaos in the field. And so one thing I'd be worried, I would be wondering, is how are y'all seeing that over, you know, in your areas? But at the same time, I'm fascinated watching how people are navigating it, because some people are navigating it like, well, it just doesn't exist. I'm going to pretend like it didn't even going on, I'm just going to keep going, and with mixed success.

Debra Ruh: 17:06

But at the same time, I'm seeing I'm still seeing innovation happening. Just was, a new client reached out to me yesterday that I'm very excited about working with, and I was shocked that they were doing it. I was so shocked, and it's a big, gigantic company, of course, but I've never seen this type, this company, in the space. Maybe they are in the space, and I just don't know it right, because I don't know everything, but I'm finding myself that there is still stuff happening, there's still innovation happening, but it's being talked about differently, in different ways, just so that everybody can stay safe, but still there's so much chaos happening just in my country that I see a lot of disruptions, a lot of problems, but then I'm seeing these silver linings that are just really making me optimistic. So I'm curious, what are y'all seeing?

Debra Ruh: 17:58

And, neil, if you want to weigh in on this too, because, once again, I think sometimes excessive when I first met Neil 11 years ago, neil said something I thought was sort of mean about the US, and he was saying that we were all just a bunch of cowboys accessibility, do whatever we wanted to do. And, by the way, there was some truth to that, some big truth to that. But at the same time, we've watched it shift and move and become so much more than I think any of us even know. And so that's another reason why I'm asking from that perspective, because this is not about the US, this is about humans, this is about human inclusion. Why would you build anything Developers, programmers, why that doesn't work for the humans. I don't even understand that, and so there's such, you know. So I was just curious what you're seeing, and maybe Neal, if you want to come in after her and talk about it. But I think I'm I'm being a little seeing some hopefulness, so over to you I?

Julia Undeutsch: 18:56

I think so. At least I'm, or maybe I'm too I'm surrounded only by by people who are for accessibility and do everything for more inclusion, so I maybe do not see the other the bad stuff happening also, like new inventions where you think, like how good the website is, a new website and still not inclusive, or, um, mostly focus on the the good things happening, the good new things, and, of course, I can also not see the web anymore without my accessibility eyes. So when there's a new website, especially when they claim they are so inclusive, I immediately check and I think, okay, what's going on? Why not ask someone? Or I don't know? For me, some things seem so simple that I do not get. Why do we not just do it in a simple way? Why do they work? I'm not sure how people are thinking. I'm also. I'm very hopeful, of course, and yeah, I think the people also need more, still more awareness or work closely with people with disabilities, especially like this, because I think they do not understand unless they face it themselves.

Neil Milliken: 20:07

It's nice to be working with people that care. I think that what I'm seeing at the moment at a macro level, at a global level, is reframing of disability inclusion as disability innovation, and we've always said that actually accessibility and disability is an innovation trigger. But people are using new vocabulary to describe some of the work they're doing out of necessity, because certain words will get you protruded from government contracts and we were recently looking at. We have to, within our organization, revisit our company policies on a regular basis, and one of the things that we want to do with company policies is actually make them public wherever possible. So our accessibility policy, we have a public version. What we want to do is make as much of the whole policy public of the whole policy, and then you only have the stuff that relates to your internal processes, separate things, and the dilemma that we have and that we face now is that in certain countries, if you put certain words into those policies that are essentially the bylaws of your company, that you may be potentially damaging your business, even though you believe that it's good for business as a whole, that you may be protruded from doing business. So you know, one of those words is inclusion, right, and so we went in some way.

Neil Milliken: 21:47

So we ended up sort of splitting things. So non-discrimination is one thing, so it's disability, non-discrimination and disability-led innovation. So we then had to, you know, we had to think about how could we address those topics, but in ways that don't fall foul of keyword searches that would really then potentially have an unintended bad consequence for an organization. So I think that those are things that we have to think about as we go forwards. On the other hand, we are also finding new ways to embed it into parts of the business, because we're having to do that and we're not standalone. So I know, julia, you wanted to cover a little bit about your back history and inclusive as well, which I think is really good.

Julia Undeutsch: 22:44

What I realized when I started in 2020 to get more into accessibility and at that time seemed for me something new, or something I get into now which I never thought about it before that inclusion, that I already experiencing stuff about inclusion way back then in my previous jobs which I back then did not realize. This is something about inclusion. This came later on, when I started working more in the field actually, and this was, for example, that when starting at the casino, I was still talking in my dialect, so like a very hard austrian dialect. But the casino is a is a place where many people from all around the world are coming and also and most of them do not speak german that well, if they speak german at all but people, when you are learning german of, of course, you'll understand that they're book phrases, german, and so it's, of course, not easy for them to understand the dialect. And this was the first time I realized, because I had to repeat myself over and over again, that this is a problem. Actually, this is something a very big problem. It's annoying for both of us to repeat myself, and the easiest way is that I start speaking in written language In a plain I'm not sure how it is called in English, but of course, not the dialect, but the normal German. And, yeah, this was the first time I really worked hard on myself to speak this very good German for the others to understand, and I was also happy. It was not for me something. Okay, why should I change? It was something. Of course I change Because I'm one single person and there's so many people who need me to speak a good German to better understand.

Julia Undeutsch: 24:24

And this was, yeah, later on I just realized what I did because of to be more inclusive and to make it better for everyone and also some I would not say funny, but very interesting things happened at the poker table. For example, there was one person who had both arms, were prosthesis sorry, prosthesis or something, and all the poker tables are the same and he was playing already for hours. But on big events we also had this feature table which was live streamed, so the table was bigger and the cameras were put everywhere and I was sitting on this table and I was shuffling and pitching my cards and suddenly the person which I know already for hours said, hey, dealer, I cannot reach my cards. And I was like what's happening? Yeah, I cannot reach my cards and I was like, what's happening? Yeah, I cannot reach my cards because of the prosthesis and the table was higher, you could not bend it that wide. And it was a very weird moment for me because I never thought about it, because it had worked until then and I was like, okay, what should I do now?

Julia Undeutsch: 25:26

And then I thought very much about rules, because do you now say to the player, okay, you cannot play poker anymore? I mean, there are, there are rules. And then there are people who cannot. What? What should he do? He was already playing for us and, yeah, I thought a lot about rulings and and if this is, it's a rule, comes the rules first or the person first? And also one time I had someone who was deaf and using sign language. But there's no, and sign language is a language and you can only speak English on the table, it's only English aloud. What do you do then? Say, hey, you can't speak sign language. This was, yeah, there were many interesting stuff happening which I did not give that much thought back then, but today I really think often about these times when this stuff happening and, yeah, I would be interested. What comes first, the rule or the person?

Debra Ruh: 26:19

And it probably depends on the rule. But what did you? I'm very curious, how did you solve those two problems, Because those are such great examples, yeah it's weird.

Julia Undeutsch: 26:33

In the case of the person with the prosthesis, I had to call the floor man because this was live screened and I cannot make any decisions as a dealer. In this case, I have to admit, I think we had to put him, get him away from this table and he had to play on other tables, which is already against the rules because you have to sit where the computer puts you. But this was okay. You cannot do anything, and I think we hoped the floor man hoped that he will not make it to the final table because we would have not any solution for him. Wow, he did not make it to the final table, but this is what I remember. Yeah, there was no solution. Actually, this is a table and this is a live stream and we have to live stream it. What should we do when we cannot band? I'm not sure what we had done back then, when we would reach the final table Would be interesting, but yeah, and with the deaf customer that was using sign language.

Julia Undeutsch: 27:27

Yeah, I think the format decided that of course he can use the sign language, because otherwise, how can? He communicate with his friends.

Debra Ruh: 27:35

It's such good examples. I recently have just been digging into what? Because, like you said, what are the rules? But what does it mean to be human? And I just I don't understand why we do not apply those rules more often. We are humans and the human experience is varied. It's so varied, and so I still sometimes am. I don't understand why society hasn't figured this out already. In a way, it's like we've had people deaf or aging forever. It's like prosthesis, yeah, so it's interesting, though, and I haven't thought it as much. I haven't thought about it from that angle as much, and I think of it when you talk about this, and I don't know if you two agree with this, but I still think about when you're talking about poker and you're doing it in my head, it's still all gaming games, right, like I find often social media feels like a game to me, right? So there's a lot of things that feel like games, but games really should be accessible to all humans.

Neil Milliken: 28:43

Everybody should have the equal opportunity to lose their shirt.

Debra Ruh: 28:47

That's right, right and I don't know why. It's sort of fun to just see if you can win. I very rarely. I I've done it very much. I haven't ever won anything, but it's still fun to believe absolutely.

Neil Milliken: 29:02

Thank you so much, julia. It's been um great to hear the back story, and I need to thank amazon for helping keep us on air, and we look forward to seeing you again soon. Thank you so much thank you so much.