Today's hectic development cycle of building, shipping, and scaling quickly can cause us to overlook website accessibility (a11y)

We've all been there. The developers have merged their final pull requests. The pipelines have all passed. The design team has approved. The staging website has passed QA. Ready for production. Right? 😃

As the websites and digital products we build become more and more complex, it is more important than ever to ensure that we are not excluding people from being able to experience them. It is therefore imperative that we understand how all users interact with our products, particularly screen reader users. I'm not saying we all need to be experts at using them, even though that's not a bad goal, ...

We often talk about user-centered design and development, however the process rarely includes accessibility and UX research with users with disabilities or impairments. (Web) accessibility is the practice of making your websites usable by as many people as possible, thus providing equal access to information and communications technologies, including the Web, to people with disabilities or impairments. Simply put, accessibility is a basic human right.

As a developer, you want to ensure your work is accessible, but it can be hard to know where or how to start. You’ve been trained to write semantic HTML & add alt tags, but is that enough? What about a Lighthouse score of 100 — does that cover everything? (Hint: It doesn’t!)