BuzzFeed
Accessibility @ BuzzFeed
Background
When audited by a verified third party, BuzzFeed was found to have had more than 400 accessibility issues with core parts of the website, ranging from semantic markup issues to more deep-rooted product issues like appropriate alt text for our content. This experience alienated a lot of our audience, opened BuzzFeed up to legal consequences, and just didn't align with our mission to spread truth and joy to the entire internet. The tech organization became strongly invested in having an accessible experience accredited by experts, and we needed to amend these issues as quickly as possible. More importantly, we needed to learn how to create a culture of accessibility so that this experience was not recreated years down the road.
Solution
We first got to work addressing a lot of the semantic issues present on our site. I worked on fixing a lot of semantic markup issues on core rendering services, usually working with lots of different JS frameworks to refactor parts of the site to reflect best a11y practices. I also helped with the technical adoption of alt text into BuzzFeed quizzes, various workflows for our internal CMS and internal tools, and helped encourage its adoption across the content organization. Myself and other engineers within the tech organization now collaborate with content editors to help them write better alt text, and are establishing more standard a11y patterns into the code that powers BuzzFeed.