a11y

At Mediacurrent, we hear a lot of questions — from the open source community and from our customers — about website accessibility. What are the must-have tools, resources, and modules? How often should I test? To address those and other top FAQs, we hosted a webinar with our Accessibility Team. Below is a transcript of the questions we received. 

What exactly is the role of a Front-end developer?

What exactly does it mean to be a 'front-end developer'? From company to company? From website to website? Really, from day to day? Does your colleague actually do the same job as you? For example, some days I’m working in InDesign or Photoshop all day, the next I’m writing jQuery or building theme components. The very next day I am writing a blog post, prepping for a presentation, or doing research on the latest trends.

In November 2015, a team from Mediacurrent participated in Knowbility’s accessibility hackathon. One of the features we created for the site was an accessibility toolbar.

I recently had the opportunity to give a beginners talk about website accessibility at MidCamp 2016 where I covered some easy ways to promote accessibility in terms of structure, color and contrast, fonts, links, and media. It was a wonderful experience for me and I was grateful for the audience who had some nice feedback and interesting questions. Here are the highlights of the presentation, plus the audio recording and links to related resources.  

Building features into a project from the start is almost always cleaner, easier, faster, and less expensive than retrofitting after the fact.  It's no different for building accessibility into a website.  Fortunately, much of this accessibility "base" is simply a matter of building according to standards and following best practices.  First, let’s take a look at the difference between how a sighted and non-sighted user might browse a website.  

How we build a site affects how assistive technology users can access a site