Building Accessible Sites with Gatsby

Learn the necessary techniques and tools for building inclusive web applications with Gatsby and React.js from Gatsby's Head of Learning Marcy Sutton.

Presented at:

• Gatsby Days LA
• Smashing Conf NYC

Some key takeaways:

• Understand how to incorporate accessibility into your web development workflow.
• Debug your sites and applications for accessibility using the latest tools.
• Apply accessibility to React web applications with Gatsby, while learning how accessibility applies to other stacks.
• Learn the benefits of manual and automated testing to grow web accessibility superpowers!
• Integrate focus management into your web applications, gracefully handling keyboard and screen reader interactions.
• Practice announcing view changes with your code and keeping screen reader users up to date.
• Achieve wins with semantic markup, unobtrusive animation, and progressive enhancement.

App URL: https://marcysutton.github.io/gatsby-a11y-workshop

Workshop slides: https://marcysutton.github.io/gatsby-a11y-workshop/slides/

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This project was started with gatsby-starter-mdx-basic and @mdx-deck/theme.

Note: This repo requires Node 12 and npm to be installed.

1. Install Gatsby CLI:

npm install -g gatsby-cli

1. Create a new Gatsby site and slide deck using this starter

gatsby new gatsby-a11y-workshop https://github.com/marcysutton/gatsby-a11y-workshop

3. Go into the directory and start the development server

cd gatsby-a11y-workshop
gatsby develop

View in a browser: http://localhost:8000

4. Edit files:

   • Site pages: src/pages/*
   • Site components: src/components/*
   • Templates: src/templates/*
   • Slide content: src/slides/index.mdx

5. To look at the answers from the exercises, check out the /examples directory in the master branch

You can also check out the solutions branch to see everything in action: https://github.com/marcysutton/gatsby-a11y-workshop/tree/solutions

Prerequisites

1. Have a text editor installed, i.e. VSCode
2. Have Node.js 12+ and npm installed