JPJobPrepfull-stack interview
RoadmapsJS CompilerStar on GitHub
Career Roadmaps · Accessibility

Career roadmap

Accessibility Engineer

Make products usable by everyone, and make the legal risk of not doing so go away.

Time
4-7 months part-time
Entry bar
Frontend experience. The specialism is learnable on top of existing web skills.
Stages
5 · 25 topics
0/25 studied0%
All roadmaps

Before you start Accessibility

  • Solid HTML and CSS
  • JavaScript and one component framework
  • Patience for reading specifications

Foundations

3-4 weeks · 0/5 topics

Understand who you are building for before learning the rules written for them.

  1. The specification makes sense only once you know the behaviour it describes.

    • Vision, motor, cognitive and hearing needs
    • Screen readers, magnifiers, switch access
    • Voice control and speech input
    • Situational and temporary impairment

  2. Most accessibility bugs are solved by using the correct element in the first place.

    • Landmarks, headings and document outline
    • Native controls vs div soup
    • Lists, tables and figures
    • Labels and form associations

  3. What the browser actually exposes, and how to inspect it.

    • Role, name, value, state
    • Accessible name computation
    • Browser accessibility inspectors
    • Platform accessibility APIs

  4. The success criteria you will be measured against, in plain language.

    • Perceivable, Operable, Understandable, Robust
    • A, AA and AAA conformance levels
    • New 2.2 criteria: focus appearance, target size
    • WCAG 3 direction

  5. The reason accessibility budget exists. Knowing it makes you persuasive internally.

    • European Accessibility Act
    • ADA and Section 508
    • EN 301 549 procurement standard
    • VPAT and accessibility conformance reports

BuildAudit a real site and write up ten issues, each with the user impact and the WCAG criterion.

Building accessible interfaces

4-6 weeks · 0/5 topics

Component-level craft: the patterns that break, and how to build them correctly.

  1. Every interactive component needs a keyboard model. Most custom ones ship without one.

    • Tab order and roving tabindex
    • Focus management and focus traps
    • Skip links and bypass blocks
    • Visible focus indicators

  2. The first rule of ARIA is not to use ARIA. Interviewers check that you know why.

    • Roles, states and properties
    • APG patterns as the reference
    • Live regions and announcements
    • Common ARIA anti-patterns

  3. Forms are where accessibility failures cost real money in abandoned transactions.

    • Labels, descriptions and instructions
    • Error identification and suggestion
    • Required fields and validation timing
    • Grouping with fieldset and legend

  4. Contrast, spacing and motion. The part where you negotiate with designers.

    • Contrast ratios for text and UI components
    • Text resize and reflow to 320px
    • Reduced motion and vestibular safety
    • Not relying on colour alone

  5. VoiceOver and TalkBack behave differently from desktop screen readers.

    • Touch target size and spacing
    • VoiceOver and TalkBack gestures
    • Dynamic Type and font scaling
    • Native app accessibility APIs

BuildAn accessible component library: modal, menu, combobox, tabs, date picker — each keyboard and screen-reader tested.

Testing and auditing

4-5 weeks · 0/5 topics

Automated tools catch about a third of issues. The job is the other two thirds.

  1. Fast, cheap, and limited. Knowing the limits is what stops false confidence.

    • axe-core and Lighthouse
    • Linting with eslint-plugin-jsx-a11y
    • CI gates and regression prevention
    • What automation cannot detect

  2. Keyboard-only and screen-reader passes are the core of any real audit.

    • Keyboard-only walkthrough
    • NVDA, JAWS and VoiceOver basics
    • Zoom to 400% and reflow testing
    • High contrast and forced colours mode

  3. The deliverable that gets you hired: a report a developer can act on.

    • Scoping and representative page sampling
    • Severity and user impact rating
    • Writing reproducible issue reports
    • Remediation guidance with code

  4. The step that separates compliance from usability. Increasingly expected.

    • Recruiting participants ethically
    • Session facilitation and consent
    • Distinguishing conformance from usability
    • Feeding findings back into design

  5. Enterprise sales cycles need a conformance report. Writing one is a marketable skill.

    • VPAT and ACR structure
    • Honest conformance claims
    • Accessibility statements
    • Roadmapping remediation

BuildA full WCAG 2.2 AA audit of a real product, delivered as a report with severity, impact and remediation.

Scaling it across an organisation

3-5 weeks · 0/5 topics

One accessible page is craft. An accessible product line is a programme.

  1. Fixing it once in the component beats fixing it in fifty feature branches.

    • Accessible primitives and headless libraries
    • Documenting keyboard behaviour per component
    • Token-level contrast guarantees
    • Preventing unsafe component APIs

  2. Catching issues in design review is an order of magnitude cheaper than in QA.

    • Accessibility acceptance criteria
    • Design review checklists and annotations
    • Definition of done
    • Regression gates in CI

  3. Much of the job is persuasion. Framing matters more than being right.

    • Teaching developers and designers
    • Building the business case
    • Demonstrating impact with real users
    • Handling pushback on cost

  4. PDFs, video and rich text are where large organisations fail their audits.

    • Accessible PDF structure
    • Captions, transcripts and audio description
    • Plain language and readability
    • Rich text editor accessibility

  5. Leadership funds what it can see. Pick metrics that survive scrutiny.

    • Issue density and burn-down
    • Coverage of automated checks
    • Time to remediation
    • User-reported barrier tracking

BuildShip an accessibility checklist, a CI gate and a component library that makes the accessible path the default.

Interview and credibility

2-4 weeks · 0/5 topics

This role hires on demonstrated work more than on credentials.

  1. Usually a live audit exercise plus a discussion of trade-offs and advocacy.

    • Auditing a page out loud
    • Fixing an inaccessible component live
    • Explaining WCAG criteria from memory
    • Prioritising a backlog of issues

  2. IAAP certifications carry weight in enterprise and public sector hiring.

    • CPACC for breadth
    • WAS for technical depth
    • What certification does and does not prove
    • Study resources and cost

  3. Published audits and fixed components are the currency of this field.

    • A public audit report
    • Open-source accessibility contributions
    • Before/after remediation case study
    • Conference talk or written article

  4. You will be asked to fix code, not just find faults in it.

    • Component framework fluency
    • CSS layout and focus styling
    • Debugging in the browser
    • Writing tests for accessibility behaviour

  5. Influence without authority is the core competency they are screening for.

    • Convincing a team to fix an issue
    • Handling a launch with known barriers
    • Balancing legal risk against delivery
    • Working with designers on contrast

BuildA public audit write-up and an open-source accessible component library.

Accessibility tools on your CV

  • axe DevTools
  • NVDA
  • VoiceOver
  • JAWS
  • Lighthouse
  • WAVE
  • Playwright + axe
  • ARIA Authoring Practices Guide

What Accessibility employers ask to see

  • A published WCAG 2.2 AA audit report with severity ratings
  • An open-source accessible component library
  • A before/after remediation case study with user impact
  • An accessibility CI gate adopted by a real project

Driven by regulation as much as ethics: the European Accessibility Act, ADA litigation in the US, and public sector procurement rules. Small specialist pool, so demand outstrips supply.

Content last reviewed 2026-08-31. Guidance only — no institute or paid placement is endorsed anywhere in this book.