2022 Year in Review

Our 2022

This past year we continued to fine tune our commitment to accessibility, inclusion and justice on the web through our projects, processes, and team trainings. We grew our team substantially, partnered with some very rad folks, and committed to worker-ownership and a four day work week.

Growing our Team

We added three new engineers (Aleena Khan, Paul Clue, and Chris Cueller), two product managers (Grace McCants and Sarah Z. Hakani), a Technical Project Manager (Carmen Cañas, and a Web Platform Program Lead (Lola Odelola). We have even more folks joining our team in 2023 so keep your eyes peeled for new faces on our Team page and be sure to check for open positions as we continue to grow.

Learning and Growing

This year we dedicated even more time to team trainings in the realms of social justice and web standards. Since 2020 we’ve held company-wide Black Lives Matter Day of Action with team cultivated lists of educational materials and action steps, followed by conversations. In 2022 we added Climate Days of Action to the mix with the help of our newly formed Climate Justice team. We were honored to kick off our Climate Day of Action with a training from The Red Nation’s Jennifer Marley.

We started the year with a training on Intersectional Feminism with Kay Martinez to help us flesh out what it means to be a feminist tech company. We also had training led internally and with Kifah Shah and Bianca Nozaki-Nasser to get on the same page about abolition and activism. Our team pursued self guided courses in accessibility technology and participated in LaVant Consulting’s Disability Inclusive Workplace Culture workshop and the Alt Text as Poetry Workshop led by Finnegan Shannon and Bojana Coklyat. We believe that as individuals and a company we can always learn and grow, and we’re excited to continue our days of action and trainings in 2023.

In 2022 we continued to fine tune our goal of becoming worker owned with the help of our internal Co-Op team and the United States Federation of Worker Cooperatives. We’re also excited to start the new year by moving to four day work weeks to help with work life balance.

Advancing our Partnerships

• Kicked off a full website redesign for the AAPI advocacy nonprofit 18 Million Rising.
• Continued our work with the Google Chrome team on the Web Audio DevTools Inspector.
• Made our first major contribution to the Chromium browser engine, integrating web bluetooth with Chromium Devtools, and Puppeteer.
• Worked with Google Rendering focusing on issues related to lazy loading, event listeners, and other ways devs control rendering behavior.
• Created a website about climate, abolition, and Afrofuturism in Harlem with a Harvard GSD Climate Justice Fellow.
• Redesigned and published the WC3’s ARIA Authoring Practice Guide.
• Improved the ARIA-AT manual testing system for Assistive Technology interoperability.
• Created an Assistive Technology Automation Specification, initially targeted at automating screen readers for testing.
• Evaluated and reported on the Meta Quest virtual reality browser’s compatibility with web standards and APIs.
• Kicked off product strategy work with Mozilla, developing an analysis of web platform features in Gecko to help prioritize compatibility features.
• Worked with Muckrock to improve developer onboarding and accessibility of their open-source platforms, including Document Cloud.
• Continued our work with National Resources Canada to create a roadmap for accessible HTML maps.
• Kicked off engineering and product management projects related to several areas of Scratch Foundation’s work, including site/product accessibility, moderation tools,and Scratch for Schools.
• Delivered an accessible website redesign of Stop LAPD Spying, including documentation and ongoing maintenance.
• Worked with UMass Amherst Institute for Digital Public Infrastructure to develop accessible wireframes for two new apps.
• Worked with Yancey Consulting on The We’s Match, delivering a roadmap for the development and management of an app to facilitate funding for projects of Black women entrepreneurs.