How do you build an accessible and scalable web app from the get go? How do you structure your DOM and information in way that's meaningful, even without any design or CSS? In this talk, we'll go over how to use semantic HTML to create a usable, scalable, and accessible page out of the box.
Level: Beginner
Length: 30 mins
- Provide an overview on what semantic HTML is
- Go over some do's and dont's when writing semantic HTML
- Deep dive into the impact that semantic HTML has on accesibility and scalability
- Provide examples of semantic approaches when writing HTML
This talk is aimed at beginners and seasoned developers in the web community. I'll spend some time covering the importance of accessibility on the web and give an overview on the tools available to us to allow us to write accessible web apps. Then I'll dive into what semantic HTML is and how to leverage it to make our web apps accessible from a purely HTML standpoint. I'll show a demo of a "non-semantic" HTML web app side by side with the same app re-written with semantic HTML and we'll go through an accessibility audit using a real screenreader and keyboarding. I'll also cover how writing web apps this way allows us to more easily create scalable code. The audience should walk away from this talk with a deeper understanding of how web apps are used in an accessible way in the real world and how using HTML properly can help reduce the overhead of ensuring their web apps are accessible.