Everyone talks about accessibility - or a11y - but how often is accessibility a primary thought during your development pipeline? How often is accessibility taken for granted? It’s easy to push it aside and say you’ll do it later or to forget entirely. It’s easy to drop a couple WAI-ARIA tags into your HTML and move on, but this doesn’t address many accessibility needs. When was the last time you used your website with your eyes closed?

Let’s do just that. Let’s try to navigate a website with a blindfold on. Let’s try to use a website without a mouse. Let’s try navigating a website with a visual impairment. And then let’s fix the problems encountered.

We will focus on experiencing a website as a user with two types of impairments:
* Visual impairments, such as color blindness, low visual acuity, and a complete lack of vision
* Mobility impairments, preventing users from using a mouse for input

These impairments are quite common and are simple to simulate using a combination of browser extensions and existing tools in your operating system. For each impairment, we will look at how the markup (both the semantic structure and the attributes), the colors and contrast, tab order, and focus affect the experience. And for each issue we encounter, we will look at specific ways that experience can be improved.

Last, we will look at testing strategies to audit your code for potential accessibility issues, using extensions such as Google’s Lighthouse, Deque’s axe-engine, and others.

Previous workshops:
CodeMash - January, 2019
Music City Tech - May, 2019
THAT Conference - September, 2019