Don’t bother telling Kaitlyn Edge, Senior Digital Accessibility Specialist at BlueCross, that she can’t do something.
When she decided she wanted to attend a performing arts high school in her home city of Atlanta, it didn’t matter that the school was a two-hour bus ride away, or that she had no plans for a career in the performing arts. Kaitlyn knew what she wanted and went for it.
“I entered Pebblebrook High School shy and with lots of stage fright,” Kaitlyn remembers. “But I came out of it able to get in front of a group of people and confidently speak — and legitimately enjoy it!”
Those skills would be a huge benefit to her career, but it wouldn’t be until college that Kaitlyn would have to draw on her tenacity for a challenge she never expected.
Undaunted by a diagnosis
In her sophomore year at Georgia State University, a doctor diagnosed her with a degenerative condition affecting her vision. In the same breath that he explained her vision would keep deteriorating with no cure, the doctor asked what Kaitlyn planned to do with her life. She already knew she wanted to join the Peace Corps.
“I distinctly remember him saying ‘You’re going blind, you can’t just go ship off to Cameroon,’” Kaitlyn says. “So I looked at him, and at my mom, whose jaw was already on the floor by this point from the news, and I just got up and left.”
Kaitlyn found another doctor who encouraged her to work around her condition and achieve her goals, and after graduating college with a degree in sociology, she was working as a sustainable agricultural volunteer in Panama. A month into training, her group was required to start hiking an hour and a half up a mountain to a remote farming community.
“I tripped and fell so many times my legs were bloody,” Kaitlyn says with a laugh.
“When we got back to training, my supervisors sat me down and said there wasn’t a safe way for me to be involved there, and that they were sending me home.”
Rather than accept defeat, Kaitlyn kept working with her contacts in the Peace Corps to find a form of service that better suited her needs — and her talents.
Her persistence paid off, and it wasn’t long before she was back in Panama for two tours of duty with the Peace Corps. After teaching gardening and sustainable living to elementary school students in one community, she helped an organization of people with visual disabilities develop and launch a successful anti-bullying program for middle schoolers across the country.
“One of the greatest accomplishments of my career was learning they were still giving those classes a year after I had left,” Kaitlyn says. “That’s the whole point of Peace Corps.”
While in Panama, Kaitlyn also met her wife, Aria, who was in the country as a translator at the Turkish embassy. Aria returned to the U.S. with Kaitlyn to start a new life together, neither knowing their path would lead them to Chattanooga — and Kaitlyn to BlueCross.
Spotting opportunities
Knowing she’d be going back to the states, Kaitlyn applied through a contracting agency as a project coordinator and was assigned to BlueCross, supporting additions and improvements to the member website. It felt at first like a big change from the Peace Corps, until Kaitlyn met her mission-driven team.
“A lot of my friends looked at me funny when I told them I was working for a health insurance company,” Kaitlyn admits. “But then I get here, and I work with a team whose truly number-one priority is our members, through everything they do. All day, every day, everybody’s thinking, ‘Well, is what we’re communicating going to be easy for a member to understand?’”
It wasn’t long before Kaitlyn noticed opportunities for the team to improve accessibility on the BlueCross website.
“As somebody using a screen reader, I was in a unique position to look at the website from a different vantage point,” Kaitlyn says. “Luckily, I had managers who were excited and ready to jump in the deep end with me.”
Those opportunities for improvement turned into an opportunity for Kaitlyn to join the team permanently and head up accessibility for user experience. Now a mother to a young child, Kaitlyn helps ensure all sites and apps used by members are compatible with assistive devices and designed with all users in mind. It’s a role she’s passionate about.
Most recently, she helped create the formal Accessibility Statement on the BlueCross site, which sets the bar for the company’s commitment to digital accessibility.
“I like to say that my greatest strength is empathy. And that’s kind of how I guide my career, both in the past as a Peace Corps volunteer and even now working at Blue Cross,” Kaitlyn says.
“My No. 1 goal is to meet the members where they are and make sure that they have everything they need to do what they need to do.”