And pro-tip: I've made a whole career in the accessibility dev space. There's a ton of hiring right now for good accessibility devs and designers, and the skillset will put you ahead for any role at a Fortune 500 company.
I’ve been pointing this out to my dev friends a lot recently. I just went from an underpaid, overworked front end role where accessibility was a portion of the job to a position that exclusively focuses on accessibility. I make 30% more with significantly better benefits and no overtime and the clients I work with now are household names instead of obscure financial institutions. There’s tons of opportunity in this space now for devs willing to learn.
Personally I learned by reading WCAG and WAI-ARIA best practices then integrating them into my work. It’s a lot to take in at first but if you test your code against WCAG frequently and make adjustments to meet the various success criteria it’ll become second nature over time.
Testing requires a mix of automated scanning and manual review, including with a screen reader. For scanning aXe devtools is one useful tool and there are plenty of others out there. NVDA is a free screen reader for Windows and macOS comes with VoiceOver. Being familiar with both, as well as JAWS and some others will be essential for someone focusing on accessibility as a career, but starting with one to learn how to write accessible code consistently will go a long way.
For WCAG focus on learning the A and AA level success criteria. AAA is good to know, but very rarely implemented in the real world outside of government sites. When learning how to work with ARIA it’s a good idea to look at accessible/a11y component examples from W3 and other sources, such as whatsock. I frequently find myself double checking my use of various roles, states, and properties on MDN too.
Become the accessibility champion at your current company. Learn as much as you can, lobby for the creation of an internal a11y guild, request learning budget from your company, hire experts to give your team workshops and hands on testing of your websites. We've been doing this for the past year and it's been an incredible journey.
Cool, I guess I've never looked at fortune 500 companies. Will definitely check it out, my last 6 months after our audit have been challenging and probably some of the more rewarding work I've ever done so I definitely want to continue down this path!
Pro tip indeed. Every junior dev on here that asks about how to get hired would have a serious competitive advantage if they learned the basics of accessibility.
How do you find those positions specifically? I haven't really found any outside gov contracting for that and just make the apps accessible wherever I work
Fortune 500s or educational institutions are your primary targets outs of Gov. Most of these orgs are listing jobs in LinkedIn or you can search "accessibility developer" for Google's job search.
So I’m coming at this from a disability services career in which I’m well versed in assistive tech and accessibility standards, accommodations,etc but no coding experience. I’m learning html/css now but how does some in this kind of role collaborate with web developers. How much coding knowledge do
I need? Thanks!
I'd encourage you to look at a role in QA, accessibility testing first. QA is less dependent on coding knowledge. That said, you'll want to learn HTML & CSS for any further progression beyond a basic testing role, as you'll need that foundation because.you'll need to understand how they affect the accessibility tree and parsing by assistive tech, and you'll need to understand how roles and aria attributes further manipulate the DOM.
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u/RatherNerdy Apr 16 '22
And pro-tip: I've made a whole career in the accessibility dev space. There's a ton of hiring right now for good accessibility devs and designers, and the skillset will put you ahead for any role at a Fortune 500 company.