Bag of Spanners

In the UK we say that something is a "bag of spanners" when it seems to work, but when you look inside it turns out to be badly implemented.

Implementing accessible code can sometimes feel like a bag of spanners - something thrown together in ways that will probably give you (or someone using your product) trouble.

It doesn't have to be like this though.

With an understanding of how accessibility mechanics work in the browser, knowledge of how to provide or polyfill accessibility semantics, and a little bit of effort, you can turn your bag of spanners into a useful set of tools.

Leonie Watson

Léonie is Director of TetraLogical; a member of the W3C Advisory Board; co-Chair of the W3C Web Applications Working Group; and a member of the BIMA Inclusive Design Council.

Amongst other things, Léonie is co-organiser of the Inclusive Design 24 (#id24) conference; co-author of the Inclusive Design Principles; and mentor to young people interested in the fields of accessibility and inclusive design. She is also a Microsoft Most Valued Professional (MVP).

Léonie is often found at conferences, talking about web standards, accessibility mechanics, and pushing the boundaries of inclusive design (with existing technologies like SVG, HTML, ARIA, and JavaScript, as well as new technologies like AI and WebVR). She has also written about some of these things for Smashing magazine, SitePoint.com, and Net magazine, as well as on her own site tink.uk.

In her spare time, Léonie likes reading, cooking, drinking tequila, and dancing (although not necessarily in that order)!