Sara Soueidan

@sarasoueidan.com

16008 Followers 213 Following

🇱🇧 Frontend web / UI engineer, speaker, author, and educator specializing in web accessibility • Creator of the Practical Accessibility course https://practical-accessibility.today 🕸️ https://sarasoueidan.com 📤 https://www.sarasoueidan.com/newsletter

Video footage of my bird standing infront of a floor mirror and having a serious fight (with his beak and feet) with his mirror reflection, making angry bird sounds. Halfway through the video I ask him to stop (in Arabic). He still doesn't stop.

A large mason jar on the counter top is filled with date caramel. Next to the jar is a small cup of coffee (which I added some caramel to). I'm opening the jar and showing what the caramel looks like inside. It has a creamy, nut or caramel-colored texture. It looks like a thicker version of the caramel you find everywhere else.

My bird is sitting on the edge of my laptop (as usual), his back facing me. I ask him "so what'd you think?"Literally the moment I finish the question he poops on my screen. I say "oops". None of this was scripted or rehearsed (of course).

In the background I'm holding two pins: One is the map of Lebanon with a small heart in its bottom-right corner and two hands hugging the map. The second pin is a hand holding the Lebanese flag up.

The packaging for the pins is minimalist. The branding on the packaging says "Very Lebanese Pins" in both Arabic and English.

There's a foreground image placed on top of this image that shows one of the pins pinned on a black shirt I'm wearing. The foreground image is cropped so only the pin is visible on an otherwise all-black outfit.

The text at the top of the image reads "Very Lebanese pins from a very Lebanese shop @why.nattt"

"At TetraLogical, we’ve created a multi-month programme to help Associate Accessibility Specialists level up to become Accessibility Specialists. We’ve made Practical Accessibility a required part of the programme because it’s an excellent introduction to the technical aspects of web accessibility."

Léonie Watson
Co-Founder and Director at TetraLogical

Roman Seidelsohn on LinkedIn said:

Sharing Sara Soueidan's special promotion in honor of Global Accessibility Awareness Day for the by far best and absolutely outstanding and exhaustive online video course "Practical Accessibility": Get 25% off if you buy before June.

And even if you're not quick enough, it's definitely worth every cent. And your users will thank you for it, I promise.

And no, I am not affiliated in any way with Sara and get nothing for promoting it. It just makes the world a bit better if just one person watches this course as a consequence of my post here.

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"Microsoft Edge is Out of Date"

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"Your account was suspended.

Your account has been flagged by our automatic fraud prevention system. If you believe this is a mistake, please contact us at support@bunny.net."

Photo of two pushup bar grips on a yoga mat. The grips have instability plates attached to their bottom.

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Screenshot of the iOS stopwatch app showing time lapsed af 07:43.41

Screenshot of iOS Stopwatch. Time lapsed is 05:04.78

My bulbul standing on the edge of the balcony. His feathers half wet, and he is "cleaning" his his feathers almost histerically, while also strongly shaking his tail (a way to also dry off the feathers with movement).

A white glass plate is placed on a bathroom floor. My bulbul approaches the plate, jumps in, rolls his feathers in the water in the cutest way possible, then flies out... towards the bidet and then the sink (the last part is not shown in the video).

My bulbul standing on the edge of the balcony when he came back.

My bird is standing on a tree branch outside, looking around, exploring for the first time.

My bird sits all relaxed and looking all fluffy on my shoulder. He looks very innocent. I'm looking sideways with an "oh-oh you did it again" kind of expression on my face knowing he had just pooped on my shoulder.

I'm standing in front of the camera wearing my signature purple hijab with a black shirt.

On my left shoulder is a white-spectacled bulbul. It's the bird I'm raising. He has a black head and a grey body and beautiful eyes with a contrasting light-grey outline around them.

He pecks at my mouth at the beginning of the video and I ask him (in Arabic) "are you going to let me record or not". He stops pecking. I say "ok let's start recording but you're gonna have to calm down ok? we'll have to calm down."

I prepare myself to start talking to the camera but can barely hold my laugh back at the looks of him. I open my mouth to speak but instead start laughing. I pause and prepare to try again. I start speaking again by saying "in this chapter..." before I start laughing again as I say "...we're going to build a disclosure widget". I stop talking and laugh before I finally say "... or at least I thought so."

I end the recording here.

My bird sitting on my thumb as my hand sits on my laptop. He's a white-spectacled bulbul that has a black head, beautiful light-grey outline around his eyes, and a dark grey-ish body. He looks like a fluffy ball of feather sitting on my thumb as I work, and he's standing on one leg like he's doing a morning yoga session.

Bluesky login page with my credentials filled in, awaiting the 2FA confirmation code sent via email.

Thank you so much for this course with all of its incredibly valuable content! I cannot imagine the amount of work you’ve put into this, it still blows my mind.

Your course is a lot to take in but let’s face it: it’s SO necessary to get a broad yet deep understanding of how to be inclusive, being a designer, a PL/PO, or an engineer!

All those hands-on examples have been crucial to fully understand what’s been discussed. And the sources? In times of searches becoming a huge part of the enshittification of the web? Worth a thousand bucks. I’m gonna need a couple of week to work myself through them though :D

So even if it’s a lot, Practical Accessibility is the absolute BEST out there to have “all you need to know” in one place. More people should do the course and I will definitely recommend it at work.

Practical Accessibility definitely already helped me in understanding why certain components and modules at work are build the way they are build. Taking a step back in looking at semantic HTML first even more than before, was a real wake up call. As was “the lesser ARIA the better”.

Amazing work, all around. This course will be my main source of truth for a long time to come! I’m certain that this will get me on a good path in becoming a more inclusive Frontend Developer.

We are working for the German government so we’re already on a good path re: Accessibility. As always: there’s room for improvement :) Thanks again for all the amazing work you’ve put into Practical Accessibility!

Screenshot of the Youtube user interface with the video section showing the speaker name and talk title coming up in the live stream in less than 3 minutes.

user agents MUST provide an accessible object in the accessibility tree for DOM elements that meet any of the following criteria:

Elements that are not hidden and may fire an accessibility API event, including:
Elements that are currently focused, even if the element or one of its ancestor elements has its aria-hidden attribute set to true.

Screenshot of Yusuf's article with the first paragraph (quoted in the post) highlighted.

I also wanted to take this opportunity to say that this was one of the best (if not the best) trainings I did. With your presentations, and additional sources listed by you it is very comprehensive. It really allowed me to get very deep into the topic of a11y in those few months, and understand it on level I always wished for.

Marek Szmyt
Senior Product Designer at HolidayCheck

Someone on twitter wrote: "Maybe when falling behind schedule use genAi to help keep the standard of the quality of the course material at the same high standards, But obviously you make quality material"

To which I responded: "I don't use AI in any of the work I produce. 🤗 I don't need its assistance. As long as my brain is still creative and I'm still doing the work I always have, then I'm good. Luckily, I also make my own schedule and it's pretty flexible. Creativity takes time and it's worth taking the time for. I can't imagine allowing AI to take over that just for the sake of 'productivity'."

Apple Watch face showing the summary of this workout session:

Functional strength training, Open Goal. Total time worked out: 33 minutes and 20 seconds. Active calories burnt less than 100.

In the background, the workout video title is partially visible. The title of this session is "Full Body Core Collab; Dumbells required".

An exercise mat, a laptop just infant of the mat with an webpage open on a workout subscription website, and a pre-workout smoothie that contains:
- Milk
- Dates
- Vanilla protein powder
- MCT oil
- Creatine
- Mushrooms powder mix
- Iced coffee cubes

A Discord app alert dialog. The title says that "A JavaScript error occurred in the main process" and is followed by a long string denoting an Uncaught Exception error.

"I am currently following your video course “practical accessibility” and am absolutely excited! This is “the missing manual” to accessibility. You are answering all my questions on accessibility that no website or book was ever able to answer before.

Your course is so incredibly well done, it’s worth every penny ten times and I absolutely recommend it to every frontend developer and to everyone interested in accessibility on the web.

My colleagues by the way share the same impressions. Thank you!"

—Roman Seidelsohn, Senior frontend developer at Springer Nature Digital in Berlin, Germany.

A photo of a mountain afar, taken at sunset. The sky is an orange gradient, and clouds look like they're beautiful strokes of paint in the sky.

"And as we know life works in mysterious ways and in fact today (May 15th) is Global Accessibility Awareness Day—something I wasn’t aware of—and Sara has a promo running and if you use the code GAAD25 at checkout you’ll get a 25% discount on her course.
A course that I bought this morning, and I plan to go through in the upcoming days. So if, like me, you also want to invest some of your time and money into getting better at accessibility, this is the perfect opportunity.
Again, the course is Practical Accessibility and the promo code is GAAD25."

"That said, one specific area I want to get better at is accessibility. I never took courses or studied accessibility specifically; I only learned a bunch of stuff over time, but I feel like I need to get better at it.
And this is where you can help. Like you, I have a finite amount of time at my disposal, and I want to use it wisely. Which is why I’m trying to figure out the best course I can go through to deepen my knowledge of web accessibility. Because I can’t afford to waste 30+ hours—and money—on a shitty course and I know for a fact that there’s a lot of garbage out there."

Thank you for putting this course together - it is by far the best I've ever been through.

I was so impressed with the organization of the course. It was well thought out and I felt the order of the chapters worked exceptionally well.

You dug into topics I thought I had a good handle on and provided context I didn't know I needed! The chapter on semantic HTML was a prime example of this.

I appreciated the mix of learning modalities - I could watch the video and dig deeper into the material using the transcript. There is a wealth of information in there!

I loved, loved, loved the chickens joining in from time to time!

I'm sad that I finished the course... but wait - I can go through it again! 😉

Jill Bateman, CPACC
Digital Accessibility Coordinator, Ohio University, OIT Office of Information Security and Digital Accessibility

Holding a box of the CalDigit Thunderbolt Station 4 hub in my hand.

Sourdough cramique with chocolate and cherries filling.

A box of stone ground dark chocolate cookies with only one cookie left in it.

[Coworker]: congrats on finishing the program! would love to hear your feedback on it when time allows

[Juliette]: Oh it was fantastic. I'm a big fan of Sara and despite having been in the accessibility space for several years now, I still learned a number of very helpful things! Sara's incredibly well researched and it really shows in this course. I think this would uplevel an engineer way better than some of the other courses out there. She went deep into some important topics that other courses just skim over.

Screenshot of a grid of logos including logos of: MIT, Cornell University, Wisconsin University, Victoria University of Wellington, University of East London, University of Westminster, GOV.UK, USA.GOV, Government of Canada, Mozilla, Microsoft, Adobe, Amazon, IBM, Cisco, The Guardian, The New York Times, Automatic, Uber, Verizon, Salesforce, Khan Academy, Discord, Figma, and Vercel.

Three code snippets: the first one showing an implicit association between an <input> and a <label> with the input nested inside the label. The second one showing an explicit association with the <label> and <input> separated but associated with the for and id attributes. The third snippet shows an <input> nested inside a <label> and associated with it using for and id attributes.

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