Fred Esch

About Fred Esch

I lead web accessibility for Florida Blue\'s UI Team. We build sites serving Florida…

Experience

1. Accessibility Lead

   Florida Blue

   Dec 2017 — Present

   Our small team supports web accessibility on websites serving Florida Blue’s 5 million members and GuideWell subsidies. We work with designers, UX and management on design options, interactivity, accessibility standards and compliance with WCAG 2 level A and AA. We work primarily in a react, HTML, ARIA, SCSS and node environment. We build accessible react component libraries and ensure, route and component lifecycles in apps work well with assistive technologies. We build online best practices where developers can use accessible components, cut-and-paste code, read developer and accessibility notes. We support CMS apps with vanilla JavaScript libraries and SCSS/CSS. We find accessibility issues and fix them. We test our libraries with jest and @testing-library unit tests - including testing aria-markup, aria-state, roles, keyboard and mouse interactivity. We provide smoke tests and functional tests to support CMS releases. We provide guidance to designers, UX and developers. We test accessibility, create audits and log defects. We evaluate apps on mobile, tablet and desktop devices. We let designers/developers/managers know how accessibility defects impact users, which users are impacted, the severity of the defect and which guidelines were not followed. We teach designers to expand the design beyond visual presentation and mouse use. We teach developers how to write accessible code, build for keyboard navigation and assistive technology usage. We make Florida Blue and GuideWell web apps and websites more usable for persons with disabilities.