Web Accessibility at Politico

ℹ️ About

Time to spring forward with an amazing presentation on web accessibility from Politico's Evan Sanderson and Liz Davidson.

We use web applications all the time: ordering food from a local restaurant, reading news, or just browsing Twitter. Most applications are designed and coded to be as easy to use as possible, with visual cues and interfaces that help users check out fast or find the correct information. But what about users who have a visual impairment? How do they experience web applications, and how do teams take their perspective into account when creating new interfaces?

Web accessibility is the practice of designing and developing interfaces that consider people with disabilities, whether long-term, temporary, or situational.

Over the past year, the POLITICO front-end team has taken ownership to ensure that the interfaces we create allow a person who uses assistive technology to understand and interact with our content without the help of another person. Some of the challenges we faced were a lack of knowledge on how to solve accessibility issues, no tools to measure accessibility, and inefficient workflows. Although still a work in progress, we’ve changed our processes to consider accessibility as early as the design stage, we have robust accessibility documentation, and we now view web accessibility as an engineering problem rather than a burden or chore.

In this presentation we will explore:

• Assistive technology and how people use it
• General accessible practices for the web
• Common accessibility pitfalls and how to account for them
• Processes and tools we use at POLITICO to help us develop more accessible features
• Vue-specific implementations

👥 Speakers

Evan Sanderson is an engineer with a background in theatre arts and a love of frozen thin mints. He's worked at Politico for 3 years, and before that got his Masters degree from American University, and also attended General Assembly's web development immersive. Please ask him about some fun facts about birds, because he wants to tell you!

Liz Davidson is a front end engineer at POLITICO. She joined the team almost two years ago after completing General Assembly's software engineering immersive course. Prior to her career change, she was the media analysis director at Flag Media Analytics where she developed her love of all things news-related. Although she's been in DC for over 6 years, her roots are in Alabama and she attended LSU for undergrad. Geaux tigers!

📆 Schedule

6:30PM - 6:45PM: Introduction & Trivia Round 1
6:45PM - 7:45PM: Accessibility at Politico
8:15 PM - 8:30PM: Trivia Round 2

🖥 Remote Details

When clicking the event link, you'll be prompted to download Zoom if you haven't previously used it. If you don't want to download the application, you can also use the web client, which works best in Chrome.

Your audio will be automatically muted. Please use Zoom's Q&A features to ask questions as they come up.

Finally, the meeting capacity will be plenty large for all attendees - feel free to invite any of your Vue friends who can't normally attend in-person! We just ask that people RSVP to the Meetup here in advance.

Questions? Please email vuejsdc@gmail.com and we'll be happy to help with whatever we can!