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Sr. Accessibility Specialist
Location: Remote
Job Type: Contract
JOB DESCRIPTION: We are seeking a Sr Accessibility Specialist that is highly driven, self-motivated, and deeply committed to creating more inclusive experiences for people with disabilities. As a Senior Accessibility Specialist, you will collaborate directly with product, design, and engineering to create fully accessible products. You are accomplished in auditing systems using available tools to find accessibility issues, recommend solutions for violations found, and have the experience and expertise to expand web accessibility knowledge and practices within the product team. You will socialize, administer and continuously support our accessibility strategy and implementation aspiring to deliver inclusive products for our users. You’ll have an influential role championing accessibility across the organization.
Primary/Essential Duties and Key Responsibilities:
- Build and maintain relationships, credibility, and trust with business, product, and technical partners
- Evaluate, define, and when required, prototype appropriate approaches for any proposed accessibility solution
- Assisting internal delivery teams with ongoing development processes and implementation of accessibility throughout the software development lifecycle
- Run automated scans and manual assessments on web pages to identify accessibility issues, suggested fixes, and priorities
- Help design and development teams understand accessibility requirements, available tools, solutions, and prioritization
- Provide developers with technical advice during code reviews and pair programming during sprints
- Staying up to date on modern web development practices and new versions of WCAG requirements
- Attend team ceremonies (stand-ups, refinement meetings, sprint planning meetings, etc.): gain knowledge about the accessibility maturity level of the team, identify opportunities for improvement, answer questions, and provide insight
- Review accessibility requirements with product leaders that provide accessibility acceptance criteria that developers can use to develop components that meet WCAG 2.2 AA conformance and provide scope for quality assurance testing
- Drive accessibility as a key initiative in roadmap planning and consideration
- Complete Accessibility Conformance Reports (VPATs) for multiple web and mobile products and train product teams on how to update it per release
- Define, create, and curate training materials for various roles throughout product and development
- Provide training to staff to ensure they understand the importance of accessibility and ways to incorporate best practices into product delivery
- Serve as an accessibility coach to fellow team members to encourage growth and skill building
- Further mature the Accessibility Champions program across the organization
Required Qualifications:
- Deep knowledge of WCAG 2.2, ARIA, and ACRs/VPATs
- Expert with screen readers such as JAWS, NVDA, and VoiceOver and assistive technology like ZoomText or Dragon. Expert using various automated testing tools like Axe, WAVE, Lighthouse, etc.
- Experience working collaboratively with product teams to design, developing applications that are accessible and tested end-to-end
- A relevant combination of education and experience in front-end development
- Expert level understanding of HTML, CSS, working knowledge of JavaScript and reasonable familiarity with frontend frameworks like, Angular or React
- Experience conducting accessibility evaluations and assisting teams with remediation
- Excellent and effective communication skills with a passion for quality and driving results; ability to interact with and influence stakeholders from all levels of an organization Proficient in multiple user experience disciplines (Research, Design, Engineering), techniques, and processes
- Ability to understand and explain technical issues and their implications for projects and business decisions, facilitate discussion and resolution of problems, and mentor other product team members
- Strong organizational skills combined with a self-motivated, self-starter, and go-getter
(Experience, Education, Certification, License and Training)
- 7-10 years of experience with accessibility standards and guidelines (WCAG, WAI-ARIA) and assessing digital materials (Interfaces, PDFs, etc.) to meet standards
- 7-10 years of experience developing, designing or maintaining desktop, mobile and responsive web applications with web technologies (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, jQuery)
- Proven ability to identify and put into action creative approaches to accessibility challenges and problems
Preferred Qualifications:
- Bonus: IAAP Certified Professional in Accessibility Core Competencies (CPACC), Web Accessibility Specialist (WAS)
- Previous roles or degree(s) in fields of Digital Accessibility, User Experience, Digital Design, or Software Engineering.