About

Hello, I am Lea (she/her). I am a very experienced web frontend developer based in Hamburg with over a decade of work experience in web development.

My focus is on accessibility, user experience development and web standards. I have worked with most common JavaScript frameworks (React, Angular, Vue and friends).

Still, I prefer working with a more modern frontend architecture with a HTML-first approach and progressive enhancement.

The web platform evolved a lot and don't necessarily require heavy JavaScript anymore.

Why?

I made this website for fun. In my spare time. This is (unfortunately) not related to my professional career.

I usually learn about accessibility in my unpaid spare time. Oddly enough, accessibility is very neglected in my paid daily work and client projects, despite new EU regulations.

While I try to apply accessibility best-practices at work, there is often no budget for it, or it is considered as something to be fixed in the aftermath. Or they fix just the bare minimum to be compliant.

I think this is structurally broken and needs to be fixed.

So this is for me to have a healthy side project. To have some contrast to my daily work with the Heavy-JavaScript codebases.

This one aims to have good performance and accessibility, following a html-first approach and modern web platform best practices.

Additionally, I solidify my accessibility knowledge while building it.

"But there are already"

Yes, there are already a lot of accessibility courses and other valuable resources.

I find this reasoning a bit irritating. It's like saying: "Why should I bother making a website? There are already a lot of them online".

"Let AI do this for you?"

You may also have heard this from colleagues, employers, friends: "Why bothering writing content for a website? Let AI do this for you, so you have time for other things."

When I let AI do it for me, I'd probably spend the "saved" time watching TV or playing video games. But this way, I wouldn't learn anything about accessibility.

Writing is thinking. A way for me to learn.

Furthermore, a lot of good accessibility content is behind a paywall. While I think accessibility expertise should be paid, I think the very basics should be available for free. This is what I want to try to provide with this website.

"Your stuff is terribly wrong!"

Yes, I was actually afraid putting up a website on accessibility. I could get feedback like this and I don't want to be part of the group of people who publish low-quality content, misinformation and bad techniques in accessibility.

To be honest: this is where I need your help. I would appreciate it very much if you review my content and report bugs or directly correct them yourself.

Low-barrier ways to do so are pull requests (probably via the in-place editing feature).

You can also create an issue or write an email to lea "et" lea.lgbt (with "et" being a @) or ping me on mastodon.

I would like to credit reviewers on the content they review, unless they disagree.