Melanie Sumner recently joined the speaker lineup at Accessibility Camp Chicago. Her talk, “A Practical Guide to Common Accessibility Challenges for Developers” will talk us through the common patterns developers may be asked to implement, review the things to consider and walk through potential solutions.
We asked 5 questions of Melanie, looking to gain insight into her experience in accessibility.
How did you initially get involved with digital accessibility?
I started really paying attention to accessibility in 2013 when working for University Development at UNC Chapel Hill. My boss had reduced vision which meant he zoomed in about 200% on everything, and his boss was color-blind. I started reading the ARIA spec and have been interested ever since.
Do you feel that interest in accessibility is picking up momentum? How have you seen this?
Definitely! I’m a software engineer and my last two jobs (JP Morgan Chase, and now LinkedIn) have been completely focused on accessibility. I never heard about anything like that ten years ago. I think we’re all just being really vocal and finding ways to empower developers, who are becoming more amenable to adding this to their skill set.
What are the major challenges that you are seeing in making sites and applications accessible?
Probably div-itis and JS engineers that (self-admittedly) didn’t take the time to learn HTML. That’s okay though, we can get them there with kindness and cookies.
What are the examples of success that you have seen in the wild?
The United Airlines website (I really love the way the focus indicators were done on that site) is great. I’m not sure if it’s the wild if I know about it, but I led the development effort on a corporate and investment banking application at JP Morgan Chase where we increased the accessibility of the platform from about 30% to almost 80% in the space of one year (and the team is still working on it!)
What is the one thing that excites you the most about your work in accessibility?
My work now is the native accessibility story in Ember.js – and wow, am I excited about that. I joined the EmberJS core team in March of this year and it’s been really incredible to work along side of such incredibly talented engineers who want to help make it happen.
If you haven’t already registered for Accessibility Camp Chicago, register today!
