Souvik Sen Sarma shares his journey from front-end developer to Accessibility Advisor at Wells Fargo International. He discusses building accessibility processes from proposal through testing and sign-off, mentoring teams, and managing defect tracking at scale. Souvik reflects on how inclusivity first drew him into accessibility and why human expertise remains essential—even as AI begins to influence development workflows.

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Info about Accessibility at Blink

Well, hello.

This is Joe Walensky, and I'm the host of Digital Accessibility, the People Behind the Progress.

And it's off to another episode where today I am talking to

Suvik Sansarma. Hello, Suvik. How are you today?

Hi, Joe. I'm doing good. How are you? Good morning.

Yeah, it's a nice morning for me.

I'm in my home office in Bellingham, Washington, which is about

80 miles north of Seattle.

Where are you speaking to me from?

I'm speaking from Bangalore, India.

So it's evening time out here.

Well,

I appreciate you staying up late as I get up early.

It's always good to bring in the perspectives from

our international colleagues.

And so a good place to start is if you could talk a little bit about

the work that you're doingright now.

So currently,

I'm working as an accessibility advisor with Wells Fargo International.

So my job is

designing the whole accessibility system,

starting from getting the proposal to set the design development,

then overseeing the testing,

and getting the final sign-off. Yeah. So pretty much that is my work structure in Wells Fargo.

Well,

I imagine that there are quite a lot of different things that

you have to do for

that position.

Would you be able to tell us a little bit about what typically your work consists of

in a day or a week or

a month?

What are some of the things that you spend a lot of your time on?

Currently, mostly, I'm spending a lot of time on setting up the process, streamlining that,

setting the guidelines for the development team, like preparing the checklist,

seeing the grade checks for the testers,

reviewing the design,

and also monitoring the open accessibility defects

across the service line.

So these are the most

work that I'm doing currently.

Allright.

Well, we can talk a little bit more about

what's currently happening in your work a little bit later.

But another

place to check in with you on is your background.

What was the path that found you to accessibility?

What type of work were you originally involved with,

either for your work life or elements of your

lived life that contributed to where you are today?

So I have started as a

software engineer, front-end developer. I've started my career as a front-end developer.

So I was

basically doing HTML, PyPC, JavaScript,

and UI coding back that time when I

introduced accessibility back in 2012.

So it was pretty new

for me as well as well as others in accessibility.

So it drew my attention from the very first day.

I really liked the concept,

like making your website

available for most of the users.

I don't want to make it constrained for a certain type of users,

but I would like to say inclusivity kind of thing.

So it drew my attention the very first day.

So I have started reading more about the accessibility, seeing the guidelines,

started doing small POCs at that time. Then gradually, I've started becoming an accessibility developer.

I was working as an accessibility developer for

around two, three years.

Then I even gradually moved to that SME position with my next organization.

So I was mostly doing the

design reviews and the testing at that time.

So that is

how I moved to this SME path. And eventually, I have moved as a lead SME.

And now I'm managing a team of people out here in India

for accessibility.

So this is my whole journey till now.

Well, I think it's pretty common for a lot of people

who are involved in web development to

find their way to accessibility that way.

It is, I think,

a challenge to understand

how to apply accessibility to that work.

We have a lot of information, but sometimes it can be confusing about

what to look at first, how to develop your career.

What were some of the things that you found

in your own work that

helped you to build your skills?

I know you mentioned reading things, but

were there any community activities or other things that helped you

to build your skills up?

Right.

So I have joined back that time.

So I have a client called Pearson.

So Pearson is a giant in the educational market.

So they're big in edtech.

So that time, I've joined a couple of their workshops. I've attended a few trainings.

And I find it's very interesting,

building your website

not in a certain direction.

Apart from that, I can actually modify,

let's say, the applications of the websites in a certain way so that every other people

can use that freely.

And those workshops and the trainings really

drew my attention to accessibility more from

normal development.

So I slowly started moving towards accessibility and then development.

Well,

even though all of our information is primarily

online that we use now,

especially in technical areas,

there's still differences

in terms of geography from one part of the world to another.

Yeah, I'm familiar with the

West Coast of the United States primarily in that part of the tech industry.

And I'm just wondering,

are there any things that you feel are unique to

being where you are related to accessibility?

Or do you feel that it

could be the same if you were in some other part of the world?

I think since we have a standard guideline, I think it's more like same.

Yeah, obviously, abroad,

this accessibility is not just restricted to the digital platform.

It is spread across to the physical users

as well as the digital.

But in my part of the world, it is mostly digital as of now.

But people have slowly started moving to the physical

accessibility part as well,

implementing things for

day-to-day users. So yeah.

But apart from that, most of the things are similar, I feel.

Well,

you started off by telling us a little bit about the things that you're involved in for

your work.

Are there any activities that

you're spending a lot of time onright now

or looking to the future?

Are there any things that are coming up that you think

will be exciting or challenging in your work?

I think the

thing that I'm currently looking at from the last six to eight months,

it's the evolution of AI.

And I'm trying to understand how

we can incorporate AI in accessibility.

But it's a very initial phase still.

So we need to spend some more time on that.

But if in some way, not directly in accessibility testing,

if maybe in development or

creating templates,

defect creation, generating documents, if we can incorporate AI on that,

that will be easy for us

in some extent. I think that is the part I'm currently looking at.

And the last thing I just wanted to ask you about,

in terms of the things that you're currently involved with,

are there any things that

are more challenging than others?

Maybe what are the things that

maybe not so much take up the most

time in your work life,

but are there any things that you think are particularly

difficult to be able to manage?

Or is everything more or less under control

for the types of things that you're involved in?

So are you asking about that thing,

difficult to manage people when it comes to accessibility sort of things?

Yeah, whatever it might be, it's different for different people.

For example, you mentioned AI.

Some companies are moving faster than others with that.

And it can become a challenge to try and

build that into your existing processes.

But whether it's AI or anything else,

are there any things looking forward that you think

you're going to have to be spending

a lot of your time on?

Right. Like I said, so yeah.

So many companies are moving very fast in the AI field.

But as you know, in accessibility,

it's human intervention which is required.

And we cannot solely rely on AI or automation in accessibility.

So we need some manual touch, some human touch to understand

how the websites or the applications or apps are.

So we cannot completely move to AI in accessibility,

but we can use bits and pieces in some aspects,

in some parts of the accessibility.

But 100% AI in accessibility,

as of now, what my understanding is, it's not possible.

Well,

I appreciate you taking the time to speak with me, Suvik,

and providing a little bit of an insight into

your work.

So I appreciate this.

And I look forward to

staying connected with you in the accessibility profession.

Absolutely. Anytime. Yeah.

Allright. Thanks a lot. Bye-bye.

Thank you.