
Homer Gaines, CPACC
Staff UI Engineer and Certified Accessibility Professional
Atlanta, Georgia, United States
I'm a Front-end Developer with over 20 years of experience in the field and an independent recording artist. With a background in Behavioral Psychology, specializing in Neurology and Graphic Design, I bring a wealth of knowledge and expertise to my role. As a Staff UI Engineer, certified accessibility professional, and international speaker, I focus on advancing accessible front-end development.
Links
Area of Expertise
Topics
Accessibility Auditing: Getting Started with Accessibility
This workshop is for people that are just starting or want to get started learning accessibility and how to audit. Or for the people that are in Accessibility that want a refresher or are looking to change their workflows.
The overall points an attendee should take away and learn from this workshop are:
- Differences between auditing websites and mobile apps
- What to look for when auditing
- The WCAG guidelines and best practices
- Tools to use and how to use them
- Differences between automated and manual testing
- Documentation of audits and scoring them for clients
- Using the data to make sites more accessible
- Workflows and toolkits that make for efficient auditing.
By the time the workshop has ended, the attendee should be able to go out and audit websites for accessibility.
Accessibility as a Process
Your project isn't ADA compliant, now what? Where do you even begin to apply the information in the WCAG? This talk will help explain the sections of the WCAG and how to include accessibility your project plans.
The WCAG provides a great deal of information to help companies build accessible projects on the web. But it's not uncommon for those who try to navigate its content to become overwhelmed. This can lead to task paralysis making it difficult to take the next steps towards fixing the issues with your project. This talk will highlight a few common accessibility issues and how to use the various sections of the WCAG and RACI to help establish a way forward. Allowing you to move forward with building a better, more inclusive product.
Your project isn't ADA compliant, now what? Where do you even begin to apply the information in the WCAG? This talk will help explain the sections of the WCAG and how to include accessibility your project plans.
How COVID has affected Accessibility
This research-based talk will look at Long COVID and how it affects the accessible user experience, bring awareness to cognitive disabilities and what we as content creators can do to make our applications more accessible.
This research-based talk will look at Long COVID and how it affects the accessible user experience and how we as software developers can improve our products.
The Four Principles of Accessibility
While many in the design community are aware of inclusivity and accessible design practices, the reasons are still not understood. My talk walks the listener through the WCAG 2.1 and explains how the four principles, collectively referred to as POUR, apply to product design and development. These four principles specifically target areas where users have trouble accessing digital content. The goal is to help product teams understand how to think about and approach accessibility so they can build products that enable independence.
Learn about the four principles of accessibility and how to they are key to building inclusive products. The goal is to help product teams understand how to think about and approach accessibility so they can build products that enable independence.
Accessible Components
Within the WCAG 2.1, web-accessible content is broken into four principles collectively referred to as POUR. This acronym stands for Perceivable, Operable, Understandable, and Robust. With POUR as the foundation, this talk will provide guidance for understanding how to think and approach building accessible components.
With WCAG 2.1 as the foundation, this talk will provide guidance for understanding how to think and approach building accessible components.
Addressing Accessible solutions for Low Vision
In this talk, we'll look at various types of low vision and how low vision affects a person's ability to use technology. Then we'll look at coding solutions to address common accessibility mistakes that negatively impact low vision.
In this talk, we'll look at various types of low vision and how low vision affects a person's ability to use technology.
Keyboard traps and how to escape them
Part of my Empathy Series: Keyboard traps are instances where keyboard users encounter areas of an app or website where they can't move forward in the process. Effectively, they are blocked due to the keyboard actions being "trapped" on a particular element. In this talk, I will discuss common causes of keyboard traps and how to fix them.
Keyboard traps are instances where keyboard users encounter areas of an app or website where they can't move forward. In this talk, I will discuss common causes of keyboard traps and how to fix them.
Getting started with screen readers
Part of my Empathy Series: Screen readers are used by many people with and without disabilities. As developers, screen readers are an important tool because they help us manually test the accessible support of our web-based content in addition to providing insight into how users perceive our content. In this discussion, we will cover the most popular screen readers, their settings and how to get started with them.
Screen readers are used by many people with and without disabilities. In this discussion, we will cover the most popular screen readers, their settings and how to get started with them.
Seeing Eye to Eye : Design that Benefits us All
While color contrast is a valid concern, it's not the only design aspect affecting the user experience. This talk will dive into the design process to shine some light on various friction points that create barriers for users and practical solutions on how to fix them.
By learning how to apply the tools we as designers already use, we will better understand how unconscious bias drives design decisions giving us the confidence to address blind spots early.

Homer Gaines, CPACC
Staff UI Engineer and Certified Accessibility Professional
Atlanta, Georgia, United States