Skip to main content

Accessible UI Patterns

Sara Soueidan
Your instructor
Sara Soueidan

Workshop includes:

  • Snacks and drinks
  • Tea and Coffee
  • Lunch
  • Paper and pen/pencil

Full-day workshop • Wednesday September 11th
Accessibility doesn’t have to be hard or time-consuming. Once you learn how to think and code inclusively, writing accessible markup becomes second nature, and part of your everyday coding workflow.


In this workshop you will learn how to build UI components with inclusivity baked right into them from the start.

You’ll learn some of the most important basic accessibility principles. Then, we’ll walk through some of the most common UI patterns and learn what it takes to make them accessible. (You’ll be pleasantly surprised at how little is sometimes needed to do so!)

You’ll learn about ARIA attributes and when and how to use them correctly to make UI elements screen reader-friendly. Through practice, you’ll get familiar with some of the most important and most used ARIA attributes.

Some of the components and patterns we’ll cover include:

  • SVG Icons and icon-based buttons,
  • Color swatches (for design systems),
  • Navigation systems:
    • Mobile navigation,
    • Pagination,
    • Breadcrumbs.
  • Forms:
    • Custom checkboxes and radio buttons,
    • Toggle switches,
    • Tooltips and interactive hints,
    • Validation and error messages,
    • File inputs,
    • And a few more if time allows.
  • Content accordions.

You’ll learn by building most of the above patterns yourself, and testing some of them using your operating system’s screen reader.

For each pattern, we’ll cover basic, easily tweakable CSS styling, and minimal JavaScript functionality wherever needed, all in the context of progressive enhancement, ensuring that your content is fully accessible even in worst case scenarios.

Target audience:

Front-End Developers and UI/UX designers comfortable writing HTML and CSS, have at least basic knowledge of SVG. You should also be comfortable writing or understanding basic JavaScript.

What hardware/software do you need?

Please bring your own laptop, with your favorite text editor.

About Sara Soueidan

Sara Soueidan is a Lebanese freelance front-end UI/UX developer working with companies across the globe, building clean, responsive front-ends for Web sites and applications focused on accessibility, progressive enhancement and performance.

She writes technical articles on her blog and for various big publications. Sara wrote the Codrops CSS Reference, co-authored the Smashing Book 5, and has been voted the Developer of the Year in the 2015 net awards.

Location

Historisches Kaufhaus
Münsterplatz 24
79098 Freiburg im Breisgau Germany
Google Maps

Schedule for Wednesday, Sep 11th

8:30 – Doors open, Registration
9:00 – Introduction & Kick-off
11:00 – Coffee Break
12:30 – Lunch
13:30 – Afternoon Session
15:00 – Coffee Break
17:00 – The End