We’ve Open Sourced Our Accessibility-First App
Recently, we built a small site for a client. Accessibility was a primary focus, and our Case Study on that work was published by UX Collective.
We’ve open-sourced our code and provided info on the tools we used, so that others may benefit from our experience creating a simple, accessible website. It is intended as a starting point for your own journey.
Creating sites everyone can access
Around 1.3 billion people live with access needs around the world, and despite making up a major portion of the global population, access citizens face immense barriers in their day-to-day lives. They are often not considered when we design and build technology. That’s a trillion-dollar economy that’s being ignored.
Not only was it important that our site be accessible to everyone, but people with access needs have been specifically considered. You can read the Case Study on how we built the app, and also check out what we’ve written about how to design for accessibility.
When we started on the journey to create an accessibility-first site, we explored web development platforms such as Webflow, as using platforms such as these can considerably speed up development time and lower costs. We quickly found that when we delved into them, none were able to provide an optimal usability experience, particularly with screen readers.
We built the site using React, Netlify (CI/CD, hosting), Material UI, Cypress (integration testing), Contentful (content management), Optimizely (feature toggling, experiments), and Bitbucket (versioning, documentation), as well as accessibility best-practices.
Feel free to use our code for your own projects, and if you have any questions, please reach out! We would love to hear from you.
