The Accessibility Tales: Stories from the Before Times – Jesse Beach

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.