When Emeline Lakrout quit her job at Unilever in March after five years with the company, it wasn’t for a better offer or a career pivot. She left, she said, because too much of the software she needed in her marketing role was inaccessible to her as a blind user and invisible to her screen reader.
If coworkers asked her to use Trello, a project management tool made by Atlassian Corp., she would politely request alternatives. Software from Anaplan, a company owned by the private equity firm Thoma Bravo, forced her to squint centimeters from a giant monitor, straining her remaining vision. And working on slide decks was especially vexing when her screen reader viewed slide content as images instead of text, often out of order, making presentations hard to create and decipher.
"PowerPoint broke me,” she said with a laugh.
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