Introduction

[00:00:00]
>> Hello everyone, I am here to talk to you about enterprise accessibility. I'm your instructor, Marcy Sutton Todd, and I'm really thrilled to tell you everything I know about more advanced levels of accessibility for tech leads. Really anyone who's at a more senior level who wants to know how to incorporate accessibility at organizations of medium to larger sizes.

[00:00:24]
So we have our materials available on GitHub, I've shared them in the chat, you can find them on my GitHub, Marcy Sutton, Frontend Masters Enterprise Accessibility. It's sort of optional, if you want to check these out and build them locally, you can. The exercises are all in there.

[00:00:41]
So let's take a little tour of our setup today. So here we are in GitHub. I have this cloned locally in my text editor VS code. So I'll be jumping back and forth between the browser and the text editor. And most of the time we'll be looking at the site in the browser.

[00:01:02]
So let's dive in. Just to start, I'll tell you a little bit about who I am and how did I get into this. So, I'm Marcy, I started as a web developer and really found accessibility mattered to me, once I learned about it, I met people with disabilities on the job and it changed my whole world.

[00:01:21]
And so, my hope for you in this course, if you haven't already gotten that spark and that light bulb of, whoa, accessibility is really important. I hope to open that door for you today, especially as tech leads and people in influential roles. You can turn other coworkers and colleagues into champions and make an impact.

[00:01:44]
It's like that's what today is all about, is seeing what opportunities we can find to improve accessibility and really pushing the needle wherever we can in a sustainable manner, but we can make a difference, especially as tech leads. So let's talk about what things do you need to watch out for, what types of tools and techniques will come in handy.

[00:02:09]
So we have a lot to cover today, let's dive in. So, we're gonna go through all kinds of things, all kinds of reasons to care about accessibility, how to convince stakeholders. Cuz there's different persuasive arguments you could make depending on who you're talking to or what jobs you're trying to complete.

[00:02:29]
We'll get into more tactical things as well and we'll get pretty technical later on. But I think we can break accessibility down into smaller parts and I wanna start with minimum viable products. So MVPs, which you may or may not work in an agile life cycle or that style of working, but I think there are lessons that we can take from the minimum viable product concept to apply to accessibility.

[00:02:58]
We'll dig into accessible user interfaces, what makes an accessible user interface at least, as much as we can fit in today. We'll talk about screen readers and Aria, and what goes into accessible names, and how to make user interfaces that work with assistive technologies like screen readers, and we'll get really technical with that.

[00:03:22]
We'll dive into accessibility in JavaScript applications, which has been a passion topic of mine for a long time, because there are so many JavaScript-heavy applications out there. Many of them don't have accessibility built into them, or they have kind of mixed levels of it, and I've always seen that as an opportunity for improvement.

[00:03:42]
So it's like, well, people are building it, let's make those accessible. So we'll talk about some unique aspects of accessibility and JavaScript apps. We'll look at test automation for accessibility, kind of where accessibility can slot into your different test suites and different tools. And then we'll get more, I guess, soft skills is how we describe this sometimes, but organizational skill building.

[00:04:08]
So who do you have to convince? What are we really doing this for, also? To put an emphasis on the work that we do with accessibility for the rights of people with disabilities. And then we'll wrap up for the day. So, I'm excited, and thanks for being here.