What I'm actually working on at Folkæt
A little mid-internship update.
When I first wrote about my upcoming internship at Folkæt, I mostly wrote about what I expected to work on. Now that I’ve been there for a while, I can finally write about what the internship has actually turned into.
Most of my work sits somewhere between accessibility, UX and front-end development. The main project I’m currently working on is a page intended to make Folkæt more accessible to neurodivergent users. It explores ways for people to communicate preferences and accessibility needs, supported by pictograms that make the information easier to recognise and understand.
The project is still being iterated on, so the solution isn’t final yet. A questionnaire will help qualify the direction and show which parts are genuinely useful before the work moves further. That has made the process feel way different from designing something based only on my own assumptions: the point isn’t simply to add more settings, but to work out which information people actually need and how it should be presented.
Alongside that project, I’ve also worked on separate design tasks in Figma and been introduced to React Router 7 through a few minor tasks on Folkæts platform. I had never worked with React Router 7 before, so understanding how the existing components, state, translations and routing fit together was part of the tasks. And I’ll admit that that was a little bit tricky. Working within an existing product is significantly different from starting a personal or school project from scratch: even a fairly small change has to fit into something larger.
That has probably been the most useful part of the internship so far. I’ve had room to explore ideas and take responsibility for my own solutions, while still contributing to a real product that other people are actively building. It has made accessibility feel less like a final check and more like something that has to be considered throughout the product itself.
There’s still more work to do, especially once the questionnaire responses begin shaping the next iteration. For now, though, this is a much more accurate picture of what I’ve actually been doing at Folkæt than the one I had before the internship began.
