sessions.a11y.club

Knowing she has ADHD has been like having a secret cheat code for Caitlin. It’s helped her navigate life. When she dove into WCAG, she discovered how much these guidelines support her ADHD brain. In this session, she shares her insights and shows how WCAG benefits more people than you might realize.

Caitlin has known she has ADHD since she was 14. Growing up with that knowledge has been like having a secret cheat code. She has learned how to navigate daily life in a way that works for her. She doesn’t feel limited or impaired, yet ADHD is officially considered a disability. As she built her career as an Accessibility Consultant, she frequently encountered discussions about accessibility for cognitive disabilities, including ADHD. This made her wonder: does she really not experience limitations?

So, in true ADHD fashion, she went to bed one night, couldn’t stop thinking about it, grabbed her laptop, and dove into WCAG—analyzing every success criterion to see how it impacts her. Spoiler alert: way more than you’d expect! In this session, Caitlin shares her insights to inspire others and show that WCAG benefits far more people than we often realize.

Presentation title:A gang of A11ys — how to grassroot accessibility even if there is no gardener This presentation outlines how Leonie and her team grew accessibility at their company from the bottom up — even without allocated resources or C-level backing. She shares examples of how to network, promote the topic, and build a strong network of allies to push accessibility forward and implement lasting change.

Despite the EAA law taking effect soon, not all companies and upper management perceive the same level of urgency and importance for this topic as others might. In this presentation, Leonie tells the story of her company, which faced the same issue — and how a small group of enthusiasts used their passion to build a company-wide network to get things moving, even without dedicated resources.

By ramping up knowledge wherever possible, building comprehensive networks, finding the right kind of allies, tailoring talks and workshops to different audiences, making the topic tangible, and emotionalising abstract figures — starting "little fires everywhere" — they managed to create real momentum.

Leonie also shares tips, examples, and alternative routes to offer a variety of possible actions for anyone looking to grow accessibility from the grassroots level.

In this presentation, Łukasz shares the story of his development team creating an accessibility-focused culture from a near-zero starting point. They took a particularly interesting approach by beginning with writing automated tests during several hacking Fridays.

This talk is partly an inspirational story about how and when it’s best to start with such testing. The other part is a hands-on technical session based on real code taken from a dedicated repository. It features a simple React application and Playwright-based tests forming an accessibility test suite. This includes a functional client journey with keyboard-only navigation, accessibility tree snapshot creation, and a series of static code analyzers. Łukasz explains in detail the meaning and value these components provide. At the same time, the test suite’s engine is ready to copy, so attendees will be able to experiment with their own scenarios the very next day.

This presentation explores key lessons in accessible mobile app development with SwiftUI. Nathalie highlights the journey she and her colleagues undertook to create an inclusive onboarding experience, sharing practical insights and best practices to improve accessibility for their users.

Nathalie and her colleagues have been developing a new, accessibility-focused onboarding experience for their iOS app. In this presentation, she shares key insights from their implementation, demonstrating pitfalls and best practices in designing and building an accessible SwiftUI app. SwiftUI is a declarative framework for building user interfaces for iOS. In her talk, Nathalie discusses how they leverage native components to take advantage of built-in accessibility features and which modifiers they use to make custom components more accessible. She also demonstrates how the team tests accessibility using VoiceOver and other testing tools. Additionally, she shares feedback from visually impaired users and explains how it has guided improvements to the app. This session provides valuable insights into accessibility challenges and solutions in mobile app development — specifically in SwiftUI — that can be applied in other contexts as well.

Individuals with accessibility issues are not able to access most data visualizations. This talk describes their challenges and provides several innovative solutions for providing accessible, informative, and attractive data visualizations.

This entry-level talk provides a crash course in the array of considerations one must make when creating data visualization. It describes the many use cases for data visualization and the possible accessibility implications inherent in them as well as best practices and examples for ensuring attractive, informative, and accessible charts, graphs, and infographics.