Personal site to archive digital accessibility-related learnings, mostly focused on technical implementations.

Gerard K. Cohen

Over the past decade, Gerard has built and advised top-notch digital accessibility teams that have impacted millions of individuals worldwide. His experience ranges from supporting commercial financial applications responsible for transferring trillions of dollars globally, to enhancing accessibility on pre-Elon Twitter.

Learn Accessibility

Testing Techniques for Web Accessibility (New)

This course teaches designers, content writers, developers, and QA testers quick and easy ways to test for accessibility, all without needing to use assistive technologies like screen readers.

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Foundations of Accessible Web Design (New)

The web was created for everyone, but you don't have to be an accessibility expert to make your site accessible. This course will help you attain the knowledge and skills to meet web accessibility guidelines and make your site accessible to all users.

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Introduction to Developing Custom Components with ARIA

Set yourself above other front end engineers by learning the core concepts and rules needed to architect and build any accessible custom component with ARIA, in order to provide inclusive experiences for all users.

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Speaking Events

Advancing Accessibility

It's time to shift accessibility past the designer-to-engineer handoff & expand further left, up, down, & right into other areas. This discussion is for Accessibility/DEI leaders, or anyone looking to move digital accessibility to higher levels.

#a11yTO Conf 2024,

Accessibility: A Catalyst for Change

I had the privilege of talking to the legend, Mike Paciello, about how accessibility can be a catlyst for positive change when it is prioritized.

HearSay podcast,

The Importance of Semantics for Designers (and Developers)

Semantics are the backbone of digital accessibility. Not just for developers, this is also crucial for designers, especially when expected to provide accessibility annotations.

John Slatin AccessU 2024,

Shifting accessibility lefter

A massive amount of work has been done over the years to shift digital accessibility from an engineering afterthought to better planning in the design stages. However, there are lots of gaps remaining in other directions and areas to truly achieve full digital accessibility. It's time to move past the focus and responsibility being strictly on engineers.

39th Annual CSUN Assistive Technology Conference,
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Latest Writing

Should developers work around assistive technology bugs?

A few months ago, I wrote about solving an issue with VoiceOver and list-style-type: none;. The response that I got was surprising, for a few different reasons.

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VoiceOver and list-style-type: none

With that bit of additional CSS, we are able to return the list semantics for VoiceOver users without needing to touch the markup.

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You Might Not Need Web Components

UPDATE June 2018 — I would like to assume that, based on this post/ conversation, Google has updated the checkbox...

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