Michał Makowski
Subject Matter Expert
I’ve spent roughly a decade turning documents into things software can actually read, working across the document-processing stack – Quadient (GMC) Inspire Designer and Automation, Ruby, SQL, and a fair amount of code written to fix problems nobody else wanted to look at.
I started in data processing and banking document generation, moved into building internal tooling and Inspire-based workflows, and eventually narrowed in on the part most people treat as an afterthought: accessibility. Long enough to know that “accessible PDF” and “PDF that opens” are not the same sentence
My perspective on document accessibility is blunt – it’s a property of how the document was built in the first place. A statement that looks organised on screen can be completely unreadable to someone using a screen reader, and you’d never know unless you tested it the hard way.
I hear same things on European Accessibility Act – a lot of organisations are discovering that their “finished” documents were never accessible, and now they should. The work is detailed, unglamorous, and quietly important – which is roughly how I like it. I like understanding how things are built, taking them apart, and putting them back together slightly better than before. It’s a useful instinct in this field and a mildly inconvenient one everywhere else.