I strongly believe the concept that accessibility is for everyone; beneficial for everyone in practice and necessary for some. Indeed, it will be very relevant to all of us at some stage of our lives.

I would consider myself a journeyman web developer including for accessibility. I am above novice – but not yet a subject matter expert – but able to wield tools and make progress. I am humble to the experts that exist around me and before me and teach me.

Grappled with the basics and some expertise

I approached this from soaking up expertise and the groundwork of web standards. Concepts like code semantics, headings, the importance of validating code and using testing tools.

These things are to me are pre-conditions for things to work that I can do by building off of the enormous work of others already in the field. The hard stuff comes when you have to make new things or make change to really existing things in the field. Numerous people provided excellent link resources pages.

Engaged with peers

Importantly to me, I talked about my ideas in front of other people and it went actually quite well. I spoke at Bellingham Codes about CSS Media Features and Accessibility and at LinuxFest Northwest about Web Components including accessibility related concerns to making them. The experience gave me some life.

I have also contributed a small amount to WCAG Standards Making Processes - Some suggestions for 3.0. This was a passing comment, but it got a single response from a contributor to the standard so thats cool.

So far my engagement with peers has been fruitful.

Generated Accessibility Statements:

Ive learned about how to deploy effective accessibility statements using the W3C Accessibility Statement Generator. Making this post caused me to want to make one for this website.

Used a few tools

My main rotation right now are a few tools:

• Axe DevTools
• Arc Toolkit
• W3C Markup Validator
• Lighthouse
• Mac VoiceOver

I am reading good stuff about assistive tools and HTML next…

Conclusion

My journey continues…

People go to school and take certifications for this stuff. I won’t become an expert overnight and not before a few more humbling experiences.

• HTML
• CSS
• Accessibility
• WCAG
• A11Y