Chapter  1 Welcome to the Practical Accessibility course!

Hi, there! Welcome to the Practical Accessibility course!

My name is Sara Soueidan, and I will be your instructor throughout this course.

The (short) backstory

I’ve been working as a front-end developer / design engineer for about a decade now. But it was only a few years after I started working in this field that I first heard the term “accessibility” on the web. I remember it popped up in my Twitter timeline a few times before I looked it up and learned what it meant. When I did, I felt bad.

After learning what I learned about accessibility, and what it takes to make websites accessible, I realized that the websites I had been building before were not entirely accessible. I realized that I had been (unintentionally!) creating barriers to access for people with disabilities without even knowing it. That made me feel guilty. If someone with a disability can’t access my website, it’s not their fault. It’s mine. It means that I haven’t been making inclusive decisions in the way I was creating and building that website. But I was creating barriers to access because I didn’t know better. So, because I’m a responsible person, I decided to do something about it.

I started learning more about accessibility, and what it takes to make websites accessible. I started following people who were talking about accessibility, reading articles from here and there, and looking into W3C documents. To be honest, it wasn’t easy. I felt overwhelmed and wasn’t always sure where to look to find what I needed. There are a lot of W3C docs, and several versions of these docs. There was also a lot of information scattered among blogs, Github repositories, and books. And there was even some conflicting and contradicting information here and there. I wanted to learn, but I needed direction.

You may be here right now because you are in a similar place to where I was a few years ago. Whether that’s the case or not, you’re here because you want to learn. You’re here because you are responsible. And you’re here because you care. And for that, I want to say Thank you! And I’m honored that I get to contribute a part to your accessibility journey.

As web designers and developers, we have the ability as well as the responsibility to help create a more equitable and inclusive digital world. Designing and creating accessible websites and applications is the responsible, ethical way to build for the web. In doing so, you’re making the Web what it was intended to be. And with this course, I am hoping to arm you with the knowledge and tools that will help you do exactly that.

I have distilled years of my work and experience into this course, in the hopes that it will save you the amount of time and effort that I had to spend when I was learning accessibility, so that you can spend that time and effort designing, building, as well as advocating for accessibility within your team and your community.

I’ve put my heart into this course, and have carefully curated the content of the course to ensure that you get the evergreen, foundational knowledge you need to start creating more accessible websites and applications today. I literally created the course I wish existed when I was learning web accessibility.

Making your way through the chapters

In order to get the most out of the course, I recommend that you go through the chapters in order, without skipping any of them.

While I tried to create the chapters in a way that makes it possible to take them out of order, there is a rationale as to why I chose the order that I did.

Almost every chapter builds upon the knowledge and information covered in the previous ones. That was necessary to avoid any unnecessary repetitions in most of them.

If you feel comfortable with accessibility already, you can skip to the chapters you want. But I do expect you to know everything covered in previous chapters at the same level of depth that is covered in those chapters.

The course alternates between chapters of theoretical nature and more practical chapters. The theoretical chapters are essential to your accessibility knowledge, and while they are theoretical in nature, they provide high practical value. They contain foundational knowledge that you will put into practice in the practical chapters. This knowledge will help you understand why certain components are built the way they are built, and how to ensure they are accessible.

Even if you feel like you know enough about a topic covered in a chapter, give the chapter a quick view, or at least scan its text version, or even just the table of contents. There is a table of contents at the beginning of each chapter that will give you an idea of the topics covered in the chapter. Each video also contains markers that allow you to skip to specific sections of the chapter within the video. The reason I encourage you to do so is because, in this course, we will tackle some aspects of accessibility from angles that are most likely different from what you’re used to.

For example, when we talk about semantic HTML, we will talk about HTML accessibility API mappings, and implicit ARIA roles, and we will discuss why Use semantic HTML and get accessibility for free is a blanket statement. You will learn the ins and outs of semantic HTML accessibility, and you will understand why we choose certain elements over other elements when we start building components later in the course, and how our choices will affect the accessibility of the components we are building.

This course tackles topics in-depth, while remaining practical. Since many aspects of accessibility are interlinked, you will hear a lot of We will learn about this in more detail in another chapter in most chapters.

The content becomes more geared towards code as we advance in the course and start applying everything we’ve learned to create common UI patterns. It also becomes more advanced in the second half of the course, which builds upon much of the knowledge covered in the first half. So, once again, I highly recommend going through all of the chapters, and doing so in order.

Each chapter is available in video and in text format. The text of the chapter contains all the code snippets and live working examples that are discussed in each video.

The accessibility toolkit

Throughout the course, we will mention standards and specifications, as well as tools and resources that are helpful for your accessibility work. To make referencing them in your day-to-day work easier, I collected the most practical ones in the Toolkit page. You can think of the toolkit as a (growing) collection of useful and practical bookmarks.

And at the end of each chapter, I’ve included helpful resources that I highly recommend you check out. Even if, at the end of a chapter, you feel like you’ve understood the ins and outs of a subject, reading more about it will help you further solidify your knowledge.

Questions and support

If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to reach out to me via email at sara@practical-accessibility.today and I will get back to you as soon as I can. If you do send me an email, I do ask you to please be patient, as there are many of you, so it might take some time to get back to each of you. 💌

You’re also welcome to reach out to me with requests, if you have any.

And last but not least, if you’d like to publicly share your learnings, please use the course’s official hashtag: #PracticalA11y.

So, without further ado, let’s get started!