How this visually impaired engineer uses Claude Code to make his life more accessible | Joe McCormick

What It Covers

Joe McCormick, principal software engineer at Babylist with Leber's hereditary optic neuropathy, demonstrates building Chrome extensions with Claude Code to improve accessibility. He creates tools like image description for Slack messages, spell checkers, and link summarizers in under 25 minutes each, using keyboard shortcuts, screen readers, and custom Claude skills to streamline his workflow.

Key Questions Answered

• •Chrome Extension Development with Claude Skills: McCormick built a reusable Claude skill after creating two Chrome extensions, extracting common patterns to accelerate future builds. Each subsequent extension takes half the time of the previous one, with the third taking 25 minutes versus potentially hours initially. He uses symbolic links for shared configuration files like API keys across all extensions to enable one-change-updates-everywhere maintenance.
• •Control-G Prompt Editing in Claude Code: Claude Code's control-G shortcut opens prompts and plans in a text editor instead of the terminal, enabling screen reader navigation, control-F searching, and direct editing. This eliminates inefficient back-and-forth prompting where users describe changes verbally. Users can modify plans directly in code, save, and close to immediately execute the updated version without re-prompting.
• •Keyboard Shortcuts for Latency Reduction: McCormick assigns control-shift-D for image descriptions, control-shift-S for spell checking, and control-shift-1 for link summarization in Slack. These single-keystroke triggers eliminate multiple clicks and context switching, reducing task completion from minutes to five-to-ten seconds. He prioritizes building the drill over using Swiss army knife solutions like AI browsers that work but operate slower.
• •Custom Slash Commands for Technical Constraints: Running Claude Code in Windows Subsystem for Linux blocks clipboard access, so McCormick created a paste-image slash command using PowerShell to extract screenshots from Windows clipboard and share with Claude. This replaced a manual workflow of saving files in Windows, moving to Linux, and importing with at-mentions, saving two minutes per screenshot across daily development work.
• •Accessibility Through Foundation Model Prompts: Foundation models like GPT-4 and Claude generate highly accessible code when explicitly prompted because accessibility standards like ARIA roles are well-documented in training data. McCormick requests screen-reader-accessible modals with proper focus management, and models correctly implement specifications out-of-the-box. This eliminates need for specialized accessibility expertise when building personal software tools.