Accessibility Developer

As a University of Washington (UW) employee, you have a unique opportunity to change lives on our campuses, in our state and around the world. UW employees offer their boundless energy, creative problem-solving skills and dedication to build stronger minds and a healthier world. UW is Committed to attracting and retaining a diverse staff, your experiences, perspectives and unique identities will be honored at the University of Washington. Together, our community strives to create and maintain working and learning environments that are inclusive, equitable, and welcoming.

Accessible Technology Services (ATS), within the University of Washington’s Information Technology (UW-IT) department, helps the University ensure that technology-based teaching, learning activities, and research tools and resources are accessible to and usable by all students, staff, faculty, and clinicians, including those with a wide range of abilities and disabilities. To accomplish this goal, the person in this role collaborates with units throughout UW-IT and within all three campuses of the UW.

The person in this position provides solid technical expertise to help UW web designers and developers, IT vendors, and other stakeholders solve complex accessibility challenges, thereby ensuring that websites and web applications developed, procured, and used at the University of Washington are accessible to all students, faculty, staff, and visitors, including those with disabilities. They report to the manager of the Information Technology Accessibility Team (ITAT) and work closely with University’s website owners, designers, and developers, as well as vendors of third-party products and services, providing guidance, consultation, and training on web accessibility.

They conduct detailed accessibility reviews of websites and web applications, develop summary reports and recommendations, recommend code-level solutions to complex accessibility problems, and contribute code to open-source projects in order to improve accessibility of libraries, plugins, modules, themes, and widgets that are used in development of UW websites.

They draft guidelines and processes, checklists, how-to documents and web-based resources to help campus units make their websites and other IT accessible to everyone. They work collaboratively with key stakeholder groups at the UW, including multiple groups of web designers, developers, and UX professionals, to help raise awareness and educate these groups on accessibility best practices. They give presentations on web accessibility to a variety of audiences at the UW, as well as to broader audiences at state and national conferences. In addition, they assist with overall support efforts of ATS and collaborate with colleagues on a wide variety of IT accessibility issues, including those related to software, digital documents, video, classroom technologies, and other IT.