[NFBCS] how to know about web accessibility

[Aaron Cannon]

There is a training course from Deque University that you can access for
free if you're blind. There's also a popular course which results in a
certification if you pass. It's offered through the U.S. government and
it's called Trusted Tester. Finally, there is the CPACC certification which
is a more general cert about general accessibility things (not specific to
technology, although they do cover that to a limited extent), as well as a
Web Accessibility Specialist certification which you can earn by passing a
test, but only after you have at least three years of experience.

If you hold both the CPACC and WAS certifications, like I do, you then hold
the Certified Professional in Web Accessibility cert. Of course, actual
knowledge is far more important than what certifications you hold.

In my career, I've found that there are two types of accessibility
professionals. The first type, and the most common are those who are good
at telling you what's wrong, but not so great at telling you how to fix it.
The second are those who can both tell you what's wrong, but also what you
need to do to fix it. Ideally, they should also be able to offer
alternatives when one solution proves impractical. I'm sure you can guess
which type gets paid a fair bit more.

Deque University and the Trusted Tester programs won't teach you how to
become the second kind. That's not a criticism, since it's not what they
were designed for. For that, you really need to study web development
directly. You should have a high level of knowledge about HTML, a decent
knowledge of JavaScript, and a reasonable level of knowledge about CSS. In
fact, if you are interested in becoming the second type, I would suggest
that you should not aim to be an accessibility professional. Instead, aim
at becoming a web developer who specializes in web accessibility. This
doesn't mean you can't do accessibility full time. It just helps to define
where your focus needs to be. Of course, the same principles apply if you
are interested in mobile app accessibility.

That said, there's nothing wrong with becoming the first type of
accessibility professional. They are very much needed in the field as well.
It really just depends on your particular goals and interests.

Good luck. We can always use more people in this field who know what
they're doing, regardless of type.

Aaron


On Mon, Oct 23, 2023 at 4:07 PM Peter Mark via NFBCS <nfbcs at nfbnet.org>
wrote:

> hi cs folks
>
> web accessibility and the whole web accessibility industry.
>
> how can i learn what is current?
> are there any certificate programs that the list likes?
> are there bogus players in this field?
>
> thanks for any education
> pete
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> NFBCS mailing list
> NFBCS at nfbnet.org
> http://nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nfbcs_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
> NFBCS:
>
> http://nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nfbcs_nfbnet.org/cannona%40fireantproductions.com
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://nfbnet.org/pipermail/nfbcs_nfbnet.org/attachments/20231024/d7b54f6f/attachment.html>