Talks

Smells Like Shift Spirit cranks accessibility up from background noise to the main stage. If your team has been stuck in the “Shift Left” grunge era, all distortion, no distribution, this session shows you how to tune up, plug in, and actually play together. We’ll break down why old approaches fell flat, introduce a more collaborative “Shift Out” sound, and give every role in your org three concrete moves they can start riffing with on Monday. No theory solos, no compliance ballads, just practical, loud‑and‑clear accessibility you can feel. Come ready to turn the amps up. We're going to 11!

Why do so many unit tests rely on brittle test IDs or complex text queries? The secret to resilient tests lies in the bedrock of the web: semantic HTML. When we build with the right HTML elements, we inherently construct a robust accessibility tree that React Testing Library (RTL) can leverage.

Many developers inspect the DOM (Document Object Model), but users using assistive technologies never actually interact with the DOM directly. In this session, we'll explore the browser's accessibility tree (in Chrome), how it is generated from HTML, CSS, and ARIA, and how it shapes the experience of screen reader users. Attendees will learn how to inspect accessibility trees in modern browser developer tools and gain a deeper understanding of how browsers communicate accessibility information.

As cars are becoming smartphones on wheels, their interfaces still assume that drivers are young, sighted, and have both hands free. This session looks at how web and mobile accessibility principles can be applied to the automotive world. It will explore how smart vehicle automation can extend driving independence to disabled or aging drivers who would otherwise have to give up their keys.

Not all bugs crash a game. Some quietly shape who gets to play. In modern game development, QA has become highly effective at identifying functional failures, issues that break systems, block progression, or violate defined requirements. But many accessibility issues don’t present this way. They live in the space between “working as designed” and “working for players.”

This talk explores the “secret life” of these issues, reframing accessibility not as a compliance layer or a checklist, but as a critical lens for evaluating product quality. Attendees will leave with a practical framework for identifying accessibility gaps earlier, integrating player-centered validation into QA and product workflows, and treating accessibility signals with the same rigor as traditional bugs. Because if the system works, but the player can’t, it’s still broken.

In this session, you get to take part! Instead of showing and telling, Lloydi will be presenting a series of gnarly edge cases from various WCAG SCs and ask the question: "Does this pass or fail this SC?" Votes will be cast live, and we'll see how people voted after each example. Expect to have some presumptions proven wrong as Lloydi gets into the nitty gritty of why each example passes or fails.

No one doubts that AI is a transformative technology potentially on par with the Internet and mobile devices. What that means to you depends on whether you are using these new tools to build something or if you're the one using what is being built. Let's examine what makes AI a good tool to use, why it has some bad aspects we'll need to be mindful of, and we'll talk about the ugly parts that could cause more problems than its all worth.

Accessible color systems often start with the best intentions: dark mode, high-contrast themes, and user preferences. But every new inclusive feature tends to pile on extra variables, manual contrast checks, and complex media query overrides. Before long, the architecture becomes so fragile and bloated that it breaks under its own weight … this is why we can’t have nice themes.

Thankfully, modern browser engines can now handle much more heavy lifting. This practical, code-rich session will walk through real-world component refactors that prune redundant code, improve performance for all users, and make resilient, high-contrast interfaces much easier to support over the long term.

Modern browsers now ship with powerful, accessible building blocks that used to require piles of custom JavaScript and ARIA. This session shows how the native Dialog element, Popover API, and CSS Anchor Positioning deliver robust accessibility out of the box, with live examples and the gotchas to watch for.

Marketing is about reaching new audiences, but marketing content can often introduce new barriers between customers with disabilities and your product. Is a barrier-free customer journey possible? From social media to marketing trailers to events, Jessica will share her journey driving Ubisoft’s industry-leading accessibility communications program, with practical tips on how to get organizational buy-in and create accessible marketing content.

Most accessibility work begins once an operating system, desktop environment, or application is already running. But computers start much earlier than that.

This talk explores accessibility across the boot chain, from power-on and firmware through bootloaders and into the operating system. Drawing from practical work bringing text-to-speech to UEFI environments, we'll examine what accessibility infrastructure exists today, where critical gaps remain, and what it would take to make computing accessible from the moment a machine is turned on.

Attendees will gain an introduction to low-level accessibility, firmware and bootloader challenges, and opportunities for future work below the application layer.

Audio Description performers for film and TV walk a wire. Overdone, and you break the mood. Too little and you leave someone behind. Get it right and the audience forgets you were ever there. Roy Samuelson has recorded thousands of hours of Audio Description for Disney+, Netflix, FX, Hulu, and Max. He brings that craft lens to digital accessibility, showing what genuine inclusion looks like when it stops being a checklist and starts being a performance.

Modern Large Language Models (LLMs) have developed a sophisticated eye for visual design. However, this rapid advancement in visual styling capabilities introduces a new engineering challenge: the Aesthetic-A11y Paradox. When models focus heavily on achieving rich visual presentation, the underlying semantic markup and keyboard interactions can sometimes be overlooked.

In this talk, we share insights from a longitudinal study of 99 distinct UI components generated across 20 rounds of AI model iterations. We will analyze how default model outputs behave when balancing complex visual designs (such as gradients, custom interactive widgets, and complex grids) against core WCAG criteria.

What if you could stop accessibility bugs before they're even written? No audits. No last-minute scrambles. No "we'll fix it later" because there's nothing to fix. Sounds too good to be true? It's not. ESLint (the tool probably sitting in your project already) is the most underutilized accessibility weapon in frontend development. In this session we'll deep-dive advanced ESLint configurations that close every escape hatch, and unlock the full power of jsx-a11y to do serious preventative heavy-lifting. Walk away with techniques you can implement today and your codebase will never be the same.