Fast-Track Remediation With Browser DevTools

In the world of single-page semi-automated web accessibility testing, there is a lot of valuable remediation that you can do right in your browser, for free, and with no admin access required. The free tools available include WAVE by WebAIM, ANDI, Axe DevTools, IBM Equal Access, Siteimprove's Accessibility Checker, and the list goes on. For the most common accessibility problems that these tools flag, this talk will teach attendees how to fix those problems in the fastest way possible, using the technique of editing a live page through your browser's "DevTools" functionality. This technique is both tool-agnostic and browser-agnostic, and can speed up your "audit and edit" cycle dramatically.

This talk will include an interactive "lightning remediation" segment, where attendees can suggest any URL and the instructor will run some auditing tools on that URL and fix the problems we find, live.

This talk will also cover some of the most common accessibility problems we've seen at Siteimprove on our customers' websites. Our statistics on "false positive" reports show that out of the approximately 41,000 reports that we reviewed in 2023, we judged the customer's page to be at fault 19,000 times across 800 customer accounts. Within those, some patterns emerged, from which we can draw lessons which are applicable beyond Siteimprove. Many of the most common mistakes can be quickly diagnosed and fixed with the tool-agnostic browser devtools technique.

Attendees are encouraged to bring a laptop.