The European government has mandated that websites and web applications must be WCAG compliant by 2025. This means that in the rapidly evolving landscape of web development, ensuring the robustness and accessibility of a website is of ever-growing importance.

In this presentation, we will take a look at how to start writing user-friendly, high-quality, accessible websites for a variety of handicaps and assisted web browsers/tools. We will explore some of the most common ways to enable valid semantic aids for accessibility & usability and how to test WCAG compatibility.

Additionally, we will examine how tools and AI can help guide us in the right direction, giving us valuable and informative feedback at our fingertips. We will look at using unit tests in the React/Jest ecosystem to ensure that all elements/components we want to test can be targeted in an accessible way and report on accessibility errors that may arise.

This talk will last approximately 45 minutes and is primarily aimed at web developers and stakeholders looking to learn more about web accessibility and gain insights on how to improve and measure it. As we will look in-depth at screen readers and keyboard navigation, the audience should be able to start testing their applications for WCAG compliance and have a solid understanding of common pitfalls.