Our lives are increasingly lived online. Think about it — we work, study and socialize online. We talk with our therapists and consult with doctors online. We bank, shop and pay taxes online. Digital accessibility has never been more important than it is right now. Despite this, making our work accessible can feel like an overwhelming mystery.

This talk will teach us how to greatly impact the accessibility of our work with various approaches to our design and development tasks. We will identify many common UI (User Interface) patterns, and learn how to approach them in order for assistive technologies, such as screen readers, to understand and communicate them clearly. We will highlight and reiterate how accessible design is good design and benefits everybody. All of this without looking at a single line of code.

The goal of this talk is to reframe how we think about and start our design and development work to make accessibility feel like a natural part of our workflow. We are not building software for users, but for people — and all people deserve empathy from the digital products that make up their very real lives.

Technical Requirements:
This talk uses pre-recorded videos using VoiceOver screen reader on Mac. Audio support for these demos will be required.

Target Audience:
The target audience for this talk is frontend developers and designers from junior to senior levels. However, since this is a no code talk, and the demos are very easy to follow, other areas such as QA and Project Management have also had positive takeaways from this talk.

This talk can be shortened to a 15-minute lightning format, or extended to a full 60-minute session.