The Accessibility Tales: Stories from the Before Times

Important note for attendees

This event will be online and in-person. The speaker and live stream starts at 7:30 pm ET. In-person attendees may arrive as early as 7 pm ET.

Description

Let’s travel back to the dawn of automated accessibility testing, to the dim pre-TikTok days when Gotye crooned about somebody that he used to know, Carley Rae Jepsen asked, “Call me maybe?” and ARIA 1.0 was still a draft in committee.

You'll hear about early, failed attempts to build automated accessibility testing. You'll heed the tale of an idyllic fool who gave much and earned little.

And you'll learn about the development of the JSX A11y ESLint Plugin as well as the aria-query and axobject-query libraries (and why they are necessary). I promise you’ll be glad you came! So gather 'round the glow of the screen and let’s travel back to a time before.

Here are some highlights of the talk:

• Automated accessibility testing was just emerging as a capability for the web in the early 2010s, as other JavaScript build and testing projects were maturing. Learn about these early attempts (QuailJS), what was promising, why they mostly failed, and what they evolved into.
• Learn why and how Jesse pivoted to static code analysis as an approach to accessibility violation prevention. This work became the jsx-ally-eslint-plugin in the ESLint project.
• Learn why static code analysis is insufficient for catching accessibility violations. To address the shortcomings at Facebook, the team built a system called Redblock that runs accessibility rules in the client at runtime. This approach is powerful but introduces high friction to the development experience.
• Avoid the pitfalls that Jesse fell into over the past decade so that you can accelerate your approaches to accessibility testing and validation in your work.

There will be time for your questions.

Presenter bio
Jesse Beach's technology career started in linguistic research, shifted to UX design and then landed solidly in front-end development. At Meta, she channels her energies into building tools and components that support accessible interface development. She believes that all humans should have access to information and services, whatever their abilities or circumstances.

Jesse is a founding contributor to the jsx-a11y-eslint-plugin, a contributor to the QuailJS automated accessibility testing library and creator of the aria-query and axobject-query libraries.

Accessibility
The presentation will have human captions [CC], not automatic captions. Please let us know about accessibility requirements two weeks before the event.

Livestream
View on YouTube

Provided by Internet Society Accessibility SIG.

Location details
The event is on the 4th floor. Attendees can enter on the third floor and go up the staircase, or request accommodation to go directly to the 4th floor. (They will need to be accompanied.) Thanks to Ben Ogilvie for making this possible! Let us know if you're coming!

The building is near several transit stops:

6 train

• Spring Street (non-accessible stop): 100 feet
• Canal Street (accessible stop): 0.4 miles

NQRW trains

• Prince Street (non-accessible stop): 0.2 miles
• Canal Street (accessible stop): 0.3 miles

M1 / M55 Bus lines

• Broadway/Spring Street stop: 500 feet

Cabs and rideshares can let passengers out right near the building entrance

Accreditation
All A11yNYC meetups are pre-approved for IAAP Continuing Accessibility Education Credits (CAEC).

Sponsors
Thanks to Asana, Evinced, Equal Entry, and Fable for sponsoring.