Coming June 2023

Practical Accessibility

Practical Accessibility is a self-paced, get-right-down-to-it video course for web designers and developers who want to start creating more accessible websites and applications today

taught by Sara Soueidan

Video Transcript

Accessibility can be straight-up difficult and intimidating. How do you get started? Where do you start? How do you know if what you’ve built is accessible? How do you fix accessibility issues when they come up? I know how hard it is to find answers, and how easy it is to mess up. I know how overwhelming and even frustrating it can be at first. My goal is to make it friendlier and more approachable.

If you’re a design engineer, a front-end developer, a JavaScript developer, or a back-end developer who struggles with getting accessibility right, then this course is for you.

Practical Accessibility is the culmination and distillation of years of my experience in learning, doing, and teaching about web accessibility. I’ve trained dozens of designers and engineers at events and in-house over the past few years, and have gathered feedback about common pain points, knowledge gaps, mistakes, and “wishlists” designers and engineers had when it comes to accessibility. In this course, I will give you the essential, evergreen knowledge you need to gain a deep understanding of accessibility, so that you can more confidently build websites and applications that are more inclusive of people with disabilities.

By understanding how things work from the ground up, you can anticipate places where you may create barriers to access and avoid them in your work, as well as fix or remove existing barriers in your current codebase. Your accessibility knowledge will also help improve your collaboration with designers, and will enable you to diagnose issues in the design as early as possible, and suggest alternative approaches.

In this course, you will find answers to questions like:

  • What is the thought process for building accessible components from scratch?
  • Do I need JavaScript to make this accessible?
  • How do I know which HTML element to choose? And Why should/shouldn’t I use this element?
  • When do I reach for ARIA versus native HTML?
  • How do I navigate the ARIA and WCAG documents?
  • How does CSS affect accessibility?

The course is very practical (hence, the name!). You will get a tonne of actionable insights that you can take away and start applying in your own projects right away to make them more accessible.

The course currently includes more than 35 videos covering:

  • The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).
  • The accessibility tree and accessibility APIs (AAPIs).
  • Setting up your screen reader testing environment.
  • Semantic HTML.
  • Responsible ARIA.
  • Techniques for hiding content inclusively.
  • Accessible names and descriptions.
  • Accessible images.
  • Accessible forms.
  • Accessible notifications.
  • Different aspects of keyboard accessibility including managing focus in custom components.
  • Forced Colors Modes.

Throughout the course, we will alternate between both theoretical and practical chapters. The theoretical chapters are essential to your accessibility knowledge, and will give you a deep and solid understanding of the What and Why of accessibility. But while they are theoretical in nature, they provide high practical value.

Then we will go over the How. We will walk through the process of building common UI patterns (such as a navigation, pagination, accordion, custom button, Tabs) step by step, using the learnings from each chapter.

You will learn not only what to do but also what not to do. I will share with you my thought process for writing HTML, CSS, and JavaScript more responsibly, to create more inclusive design patterns. And I will recommend tried-and-true practices for creating common design patterns in an accessible way.

Throughout the course, you will learn about useful tools that you can use in your day-to-day work. We will focus less on the tools themselves, though, and more on equipping you with the knowledge to understand why you’re using a specific tool, and how to use it to find and fix accessibility issues in your code.

By the end of the course, you will be armed with the knowledge, techniques, and resources to:

  • Quickly identify common accessibility issues when they come up.
  • Fix existing accessibility issues in your current project(s).
  • Implement more accessible user interfaces from scratch.
  • Feel more confident in your ability to create websites and applications that work for people with disabilities.
  • Become an accessibility champion and make a positive impact on the Web and the world!
Sara possesses a near-boundless curiosity, a peerless intellect, and some of the best communication skills I’ve seen in our industry. I’ve watched her unpack gnarly, technical concepts in countless articles and conference talks, and I’m constantly awed at her ability to make even the most tangled specification more approachable to the rest of us. — Ethan Marcotte, Designer and Author of “Responsive Web Design”

What you’ll get

  • Video and Text

    The content is available in two formats: video and text. If you prefer text over video, you can read the course and still get everything out of it that you would get from watching the videos.

  • Captioned Videos

    The videos are professionally captioned. The course is English spoken, so closed captions are available in English. More languages (such as Arabic, Spanish, etc.) will be added in the future.

  • Reading experience optimized for legibility

    Read the course in a font face optimized for legibility and accessibility. And customize your reading experience by switching between a light mode and a dark mode at your convenience.

  • Lifetime access to all course content

    This course is a one-time purchase. Once you buy it, it’s yours forever. You’ll also get free access to content updates, as well as all content that will be added to it in the future.

  • Access the content whenever, wherever

    Take this course in your office, at home, or even on the road. You can go through the course content at your own time and your own pace. You can binge watch the videos in one go, or watch them over the course of days or even weeks. The content will be there for you to come back and reference it any time you need it.

  • Accessibility toolkit

    A curated selection of useful accessibility documentation, checklists, cheatsheets, tools and resources for you to have handy and use in your day-to-day work.

  • Free, 6-months unlimited access to AssistivLabs

    AssistivLabs is to accessibility testing what BrowserStack is to browser testing. When you buy this course, you’ll get a complementary, 6-months unlimited trial to AssistivLabs to start testing your work with more screen readers using your favorite modern browser.

  • Evergreen accessibility knowledge

    You’ll acquire deep, evergreen knowledge and skills that you can apply today and in the future to make your digital products and services more accessible to people with disabilities.

Portrait of Sara.

Hey, I’m Sara.

I’m an award-winning independent inclusive design engineer, author, speaker, and trainer. I’ve been working at the intersection of design and engineering for 10 years, and have been focusing on inclusive design and accessibility for more than half of that time now.

Over the past 10 years, I’ve led front-end development for clients like Herman Miller, SuperFriendly, and Khan Academy. Since 2014, I have presented and delivered talks and keynotes at dozens of events worldwide, and have led workshops at conferences, as well as in-house for companies like Netflix, Telus, and the Royal Schiphol Group at Amsterdam Airport.

I’m the author of the Codrops CSS Reference, and have co-authored the Smashing Book 5 — a book that covers time-saving, practical techniques for crafting fast, maintainable and scalable responsive websites.

Frequently Asked Questions

When will the course be released?

The course will be released in full sometime at the end of June or early July. I don't have any exact date(s) yet. The content is currently available in Early Access for early adopters while I finish working on the final stretch.

How much will the course cost?

The net price of the course will sit at US$399. This price excludes local taxes. Taxes may be added during checkout depending on where you are purchasing the course from. When the course launches, it will launch at a discounted price. If you’re subscribed to the course newsletter, you’ll be among the first to be notified.

Can I purchase multiple licenses for my group or team?

Yes! With a team license you can buy a number of seats to allocate to employees, friends, or anyone you’d like to support by gifting or donating the course to. Seats are not transferable — they cannot be re-assigned once used.

Team packages will come with bulk discounts. Please note that due to their nature, refunds will not be available for team packages.

Learn more about team packages.

For enterprise licenses and/or in-house training, please reach out to me at sara@practical-accessibility.today for details.

Do you support Purchasing Power Parity (PPP)?

Yes. I want to make this course affordable for everyone around the world. If you are visiting this site from a country with significantly lower purchasing power, you should see a box that allows you to enable regional pricing if you need it, so you can purchase the course at a lower price.

Who is this course for?

The course is primarily aimed at front-end designers & developers, and JavaScript engineers, as well as back-end developers who fiddle with front-end code and want to make sure they do so in an inclusive manner. Whether you write your HTML or CSS yourself, or you use a JavaScript framework to produce them for you, you should ensure that the code that powers your websites and applications is accessible.

The content of the course is focused on technical accessibility requirements and implementations. It does not currently address visual UI/UX accessibility requirements. But if you’re a designer who knows some HTML and CSS , this course can help you understand technical accessibility requirements and constraints so you can make more inclusive design decisions, as well as collaborate more efficiently with the engineers on your team (which may make you your engineering team’s favorite designer!)

You’re the ideal audience of the course if you are:

  • a developer who wants to understand accessibility and implement Web user interfaces that work for people with disabilities
  • a design engineer working closely with designers, diagnosing accessibility issues in the design before they make it to implementation
  • a designer who works closely with developers (who ideally also knows some HTML and CSS) and wants to level-up their accessibility knowledge and improve their collaboration with engineers

Sara’s ability to design & deliver workshop training material for both designers and developers is highly unique and most valuable to businesses seeking digital transformation and collaboration amongst their teams. We were lucky and privileged to have Sara train ours. She left our designers and developers with a better appreciation of each other’s craft and a better interlock for future projects. — Ahmad Nassri, Former Principal Architect, TELUS Digital

Can I take this course if I am a complete beginner in accessibility?

Yes! The course is 100% beginner-friendly. I designed the course to be inclusive of individuals with little or no prior accessibility experience. So, you don’t need any prior accessibility knowledge to take it.

That being said, the content of the course starts with the basics of each topic covered, and builds up to more advanced concepts. We will discuss different accessibility topics in-depth, and we will tackle some of them from angles that may be different from what you are used to.

If you’re a beginner in accessibility, you will acquire the knowledge that will make an accessibility champion within your team. 🎖

And if you’re already comfortable with accessibility and just want a good refresher, I’m confident that you’ll find a lot of value in it, and you will probably even learn a few new things!

Do I need to know HTML, CSS, and JavaScript?

You should have a basic knowledge of HTML and CSS to get the most out of the course. We cover high-level JavaScript functionality for some of the design patterns we will build. You should know JavaScript if you want to create some of the custom widgets yourself, but you don’t need to be proficient with JavaScript to follow along in the course.

Will I be able to apply what I learn in my project(s)?

Yes, absolutely! The course is very practical (hence the name!). You will be able to take the knowledge and techniques you will learn and apply them in your own work right away.

The course is also framework-agnostic by design. We won’t use any JavaScript or CSS frameworks. So, you will be able to apply everything you learn to any web project, regardless of what frameworks or stack you’re using.

Do you offer a certficate of completion?

Not at the moment. The reason I’m not offering one yet is that I am planning on extending the course’s content in the future. Providing a certificate of completion before adding the extra chapters to the course is a little tricky. So I postponed this feature for a future version of the course.

What’s your refund policy?

If you need a refund for your purchase, you can reach out to me by email within 30 days after your purchase and let me know. When you do, make sure you provide your order number and/or billing email. I will ask you the reason why, but you will be eligible for the refund even if you don’t want to provide any feedback. No hard feelings.

Please note that due to their nature, refunds are not available for team packages.

Will I get a receipt/invoice for my purchase?

Right after purchasing, you will be emailed a receipt/invoice from Paddle, our merchant. You will be able to edit the recipient details on the receipt/invoice and add whatever name and address (and VAT number) that you need.



Got another question? Send it to me at sara@practical-accessibility.today