Note: This is the plain language version of my Accessibility Engineer blog post. If you have questions, please contact me via email, Twitter, LinkedIn or Mastodon. I am The Washington Post’s new Accessibility Engineer. I am excited to serve in this new role. To me, accessibility is about making something…

In a previous blog post, we discussed ways to make election results pages more accessible to users navigating via screen readers. An improvement we discussed was using aria-hidden so that screen readers would skip inaccessible county-level result maps, which are valuable for sighted readers but hindered page navigation for screen…

Imagine that you are in the middle of making a search on your computer, and you break your mouse. This search is urgent; you need to disprove a statement your in-law made ASAP. So what do you do without your mouse? Some people with motor disabilities do not use a…

Between primaries, a recall effort and a German election — and with the November elections imminent—The Washington Post’s News Engineering team (of which I’m a part) has been busy building and maintaining live results pages. We are always making improvements to the UX of these pages, but one thing that…

By Holden Foreman (Software Engineer) and Julie Bacon (Site Engineering Manager) Ever opened an article and started reading, only to lose your spot because you were bumped down the page? This annoying occurrence is the result of layout shift, one of many performance issues that can crop up without consistent…

Imagine listening to an audio book and hearing the same paragraph repeated twice in a row. For people who use screen readers to read online content, this could happen anywhere, from retail and government sites to media sites like The Post’s. In fact, a screen reader user contacted us in…