Vladimir Chernis

After fixing a number of accessibility (a11y) bugs in my team's backlog, I noticed other teams also had large backlogs of longstanding a11y bugs with little progress. I asked around and concluded that even though leadership's guidelines required all features to be accessible to low-vision users, the Android team had lost our only a11y expert and was therefore ill-equipped to tackle a11y bugs beyond basic content descriptions. This explained the mismatch between our feature development guidelines and what the team shipped.

I raised these observations with my manager and proposed my next project. I would proactively share my Twitter a11y expertise and design components for reuse to help make the team's a11y goals more attainable by lowering the barrier to entry for engineers with no a11y background to evaluate, design, and implement accessible features. Spreading my a11y expertise through code and design reviews, shipping reusable components, and recipe-book-style documentation, enabled other Android engineers to improve or unlock inaccessible features for the first time for screen reader users.

This work enabled feature teams across the app to comply with a11y requirements and avoid leaving our low-vision customers in the dark.