Much like the promise of cake in Portal, login forms are everywhere in web development. While they may seem functional at first glance, many users with disabilities encounter a maze of invisible walls, from keyboard traps to inaccessible CAPTCHAs. It's as if GLaDOS designed these forms herself to test us!

In this session, we will debug the accessibility issues of a real React login component live, similar to traversing those test chambers: Using an actual screen reader, we'll show how small improvements, such as proper ARIA implementation and effective focus management, can transform a complex test chamber into a smooth user experience. Additionally, we will address the common pitfalls that GLaDOS might throw at us in both the Portal universe and the real world. Last but not least, we'll discover authentication features, which will help us keep authentication accessible for everyone.

As Bill and Ted discovered in their excellent adventure, it can be easier to learn through hijinks, trials and practice than through reading. How can we learn from their experience to get better at web accessibility? Accessibility is essential to build into our work, but it has a high barrier to entry and is notoriously difficult to learn. Reading guides and specifications can only get you so far. Through my experience training my team in accessibility, I've discovered that learning accessibility testing is the easiest and most effective way of mastering accessibility. In this talk — and with the guidance of Bill and Ted — we'll explore the different ways of learning accessibility, and why focusing on accessibility testing works so well. You'll gain a method of benchmarking your work and progress, and find yourself building up accessibility experience that will last your career.

As a product engineer passionate about the heavy music scene, I've seen venues and festivals put real work into being accessible - step-free access, viewing platforms, even sign-language performance interpreters - so fans can attend shows regardless of disability. What we build online should hold up the same way. And now that AI is in the mix, there's a lot to relearn about what web accessibility means.

Through this talk, I'll share what I've found, from a recent band project, about how accessibility and AI overlap: with screen readers and AI agents reading pages through the same underlying structure; AI writing our UI, based on a web that mostly isn't accessible; AI being the assistive tool itself; and the legal compliance around it.

In this session Francois will be walking through some of the tools used in testing for accessibility.