My goals as The Washington Post’s new Accessibility Engineer (in plain language)

Image by Dave Braunschweig (Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license)

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 useful to as many people as possible. This includes people with disabilities. Some examples of accessibility are:

• ramps and elevators for people in wheelchairs
• braille for people who are blind or have low vision

I am a software engineer. I focus on the accessibility of things online. Some of those things are:

• alternative text, also called alt text or image descriptions
• captions for videos

Accessibility includes a lot of other things. There are standards that software engineers should consider, like the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines international standard. It is often called WCAG.

The Washington Post cares about accessibility, and it is helpful to have an Accessibility Engineer. This job will give me time to focus on accessibility. I will help teach my coworkers about accessibility, too.

Accessibility is not only about standards and checklists.

We want to understand how you use The Washington Post’s products. Some of our products are:

• our website
• our mobile apps
• our newspapers

Do you have accessibility questions, ideas or feedback for The Washington Post? Please send them to accessibility@washpost.com. We might not respond to everyone. But part of my new job is listening to you.

If you have questions or feedback just for me, then please send them to my email, Twitter, LinkedIn or Mastodon. Thank you so much for reading.