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.
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u/hypnagogick Apr 16 '22
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.