100 Days of A11y

In the spirit of Amy Carney and her 100 Days of A11y blog, I decided that in order to actually get moving, I too would need to have a place to commit on writing as I too prepare for the IAAP Web Accessibility Specialist (WAS) Certification Exam.

While I am nervous to write this here, my goal is to take the exam on March 10 2020 at the CSUN Conference in Anaheim CA. I will not be attending the conference as a participant, but this is the one event a year that I can get together with a variety of colleagues in my field. I’m seeing those after hours parties as my congratulatory prize for taking the test. So… no test, no go.

I come from a consulting and disability policy background, so my experience as a web developer has been pieced together from the code I inspect every day, primarily as it relates to site functionality and design. This is purely in relation to Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.1), the official standards for web accessibility from the WorldWide Web Consortium (W3C).

If it seems that I’ve been throwing a lot of acronyms at you, it’s because I am.

The other reason I wanted to start a series of posts on this site is because I recently audited another WordPress site, and realized I myself did not know how to provide insights and suggestions to correct violations of the WCAG success criterion they had, as many of the issues were actually with their theme of choice. This challenge will (hopefully) enable me to explore the themes, widgets, plugins, and other features of WordPress as I expand my developer knowledge too.

All right, let’s get to it!