I recently had the pleasure of attending Kathleen McMahon’s talk on Accessibility-flavored React components make your design system delicious!. Accessibility on the web has been a big topic in our office for a while. It’s a part of the web development skill set that often goes overlooked and it is something we can all work on being better at. Kathleen’s talk was two-fold. She showed us examples of what the web is like for users with adaptive needs and how we (designers and developers everywhere) are failing these users. It’s good to note that accessibility is not just screen readers. There are font sizing, zooming, contrast, and other issues to keep in mind. Then she gave us a look into good methods for constructing reusable react components with a focus on keeping the final output properly accessible. This was a refreshing glimpse into the problem and path forward with making the web usable for everyone.
