Hi, I'm Lidia
I didn't come to accessibility through UX — I came to UX through accessibility. After 7 years teaching math and working closely with autistic, disabled, and neurodivergent students, I now design products that remove the barriers I watched my students hit every day.
Core Skills
What I Do
- User Research
- Wireframing
- Prototyping
- Usability Testing
- Information Architecture
- Journey Mapping
- Personas
- Affinity Mapping
- Inclusive Design
- Responsive Design Systems
- Accessibility (WCAG 2.2)
- Visual Design
Tools
- Figma
- Webflow
- Astro
- HTML/CSS
- Miro
- Adobe Suite
- WCAG Audits
My Story
The Moment I Noticed
In my fourth year teaching, I met a nonspeaking student with cerebral palsy who had rejected every AAC device. They exhausted her, blocked her face, and simply did not work for her because they weren't designed for her, but for the average user. I saw her frustration, and got to work building something with her that would actually solve her problems. Working with her and her family to co-create communication strategies became the most meaningful work of my teaching career. From this effort came ComBoard, a personalized AAC tool that increased the student's independent spelling by 980%.
That experience changed how I saw every tool, every app, every interface. I started noticing who was being left out of the design process in assistive technology, in learning software, in finance tools, and even in physical spaces. The defaults are not working for everyone.
This wasn't my first time redesigning around the user. At Bob Hope High School, I rebuilt my Algebra I instruction using student data, differentiated support, and accessible technology — raising end-of-course pass rates by 140%. I was doing UX before I knew the term.
The Shift
I started learning UX the way I teach — by doing. I conducted user interviews, built affinity maps, ran usability studies, and iterated on wireframes and prototypes in Figma. Each project sharpened a different skill: ComBoard taught me participatory design with a real user. The Budget App taught me to scope an MVP around one critical moment. The Offline Budget Tool taught me to ship — to build something real, use it daily, and fix what breaks.
Along the way, I earned Google's UX Design Professional Certificate, which formalized the research and design thinking methods I was already practicing. But the foundation — designing with the people you're designing for — came from the classroom.
The Practice
Today, my work sits at the intersection of accessibility, education, and financial tools. I've curated an art exhibition with 1,000+ visitors, built an accessibility consulting site with free evaluation tools for EdTech, designed and shipped an offline budgeting tool I use to manage my own finances, and rebuilt this portfolio from Webflow to hand-coded Astro to practice what I preach about performance and semantic HTML.
I also use AI-assisted workflows — from generating demo datasets to auditing accessibility gaps to accelerating code iteration — as tools that support the design process, not replace it.
What I bring to a team: the ability to see a problem from the user's perspective — especially users who have been overlooked — and the technical skills to move from research to shipped product.
What I'm Looking For
I'm looking for a product design role where accessibility is part of the design culture. I do my best work on teams that value research, care about the people they're building for, and give designers room to advocate for inclusive solutions.