Community spotlight: Maryse Glaude-Beaulieu 

From early childhood barriers to impactful career success 

Being blind since birth, Maryse’s parents did not want her to go to a specialized school for the blind. She ended up being a pioneer in education as she was the first French-speaking person in Ontario to receive services for her disability in public school growing up. In university, she obtained a degree in translation and masters in education. 

“From elementary school to university, I had an opportunity to be with sighted peers, while learning braille and other skills specific to the blind community. I was the first, and now all students have that opportunity.” 

As Maryse navigated education in French, English, and braille, this led her to a career in translation. In her previous role, she worked for the University of Ottawa doing braille transcribing. She now works full time for a school, transcribing braille materials for students who are blind.

The discovery of Fable

Much of Maryse’s work has been freelance, in which she has about a decade of experience in accessibility. She first heard about Fable in 2019 from a friend who told her to sign up for the tester community. After what she said was a very smooth, clear, and accessible signup, interview, and training process, she joined as a tester.  

One of her highlights of working at Fable was when she got to provide feedback on the accessibility of an online news service section that was in French. She was able to combine much of her lived experience as she was going through a French website while giving feedback in English about the screen reader accessibility of the page. Talk about using unique lived experience. 

As a Fable tester, Maryse provides testing for screen reader accessibility. She has used JAWS for over 25 years, which will read out loud what is on her computer as she uses shortcut keys to navigate. She also uses a braille display which is a strip of cells that output braille characters, based on what is in focus of her screen reader on her computer, so she can read things in a more fine-tuned way.  

Tips and insights from Maryse’s experience in accessibility

As a screen reader user, Maryse expresses the importance of alt text to describe images, clearly labeling all elements like links, buttons, and form fields, and having good heading structure. Without these things, navigation is very challenging, or not even possible.  

To solve these accessibility barriers, Maryse emphasizes “testing, testing, and more testing”, especially with people with disabilities since – while a website may be accessible and compliant – it may still not work and be a good user experience for a person with a disability.  

“Lived experience is key to testing. You will get very valuable feedback that you can’t get from automated checkers, and we will explain things to you clearly, and step by step.” 

Maryse has had an amazing experience being a part of the Fable tester community. She loves seeing people with various disabilities help companies to make products more universally accessible.  

Without a doubt, Maryse said her work at Fable is rewarding. There is nothing like when things click for a customer after providing understandable, actionable, and insightful feedback on accessibility from her lived and technical experience that the customer can bring back to their team and use to make positive changes. 

To learn more about tapping into the insights from the Fable tester community like Maryse, book a call with us here.