Talk on product accessibility at Women Who Code Cloud 2019

In September 2019, I spoke on web accessibility at Women Who Code Cloud 2019, the world’s first developer conference focused on the latest in and the future of cloud-based technologies targeted towards female developers. My talk was a 35-minute tutorial on building more accessible websites and webapps, with code samples and research studies. I was also extremely humbled as one of the only four male speakers out of 29 total speakers.

The talk was titled “Making your product accessible to everyone” and discussed three key parts — web standards (such as the WCAG, including semantics, color contrast, etc.), user customization (like dark theme and reduced motion), and cloud & APIs (like generating alt text for user-generated content using deep learning APIs). It also included a short quiz about aria-label and demos for accessibility audits using Lighthouse and understanding the Accessibility Tree in Chrome. Overall, I tried to combine traditional web accessibility knowledge with the conference’s focus on the cloud.