Your Website Is a Lawsuit Waiting to Happen. That's Not a Legal Problem; It's a Vetting Problem.
Web Accessibility is not a niche feature for a small subset of users. It is a legal and ethical requirement for building modern software. An inaccessible website is not just a barrier for millions of users with disabilities; it is a direct path to expensive demand letters, lawsuits, and significant damage to your brand's reputation. For B2B companies, a lack of accessibility can be a deal-breaker for enterprise and government contracts.
Yet, for most engineering teams, accessibility is an afterthought. It is a task that gets pushed to the end of a project, a "bug" to be fixed later, or a checklist item to be quickly reviewed before a release. This is because most nearshore vendors and internal hiring processes completely fail to vet for accessibility expertise. They hire developers who can build a beautiful UI for a sighted mouse user, but have no idea how to make that same UI usable for someone who relies on a screen reader or keyboard navigation.
An engineer who knows that an `alt` tag exists is not an accessibility expert. An expert understands the nuances of the WCAG 2.1 AA standard. They can write semantic HTML, use ARIA attributes correctly to make complex components accessible, and test their work with assistive technologies. They build for inclusivity from the first line of code. This playbook explains how Axiom Cortex finds them.
Traditional Vetting and Vendor Limitations
A nearshore vendor sees "HTML" and "CSS" on a résumé and assumes basic competence, which they believe is sufficient. Their interview process almost never includes a single question about accessibility. This creates teams that are structurally incapable of building compliant software.
The predictable and painful results are common across the web:
- Unusable Forms for Screen Readers: A form is unusable for a blind user because the input fields are not correctly associated with their labels. The screen reader can't announce what each field is for.
- The Keyboard Trap: A user who cannot use a mouse opens a modal dialog, but they cannot close it or navigate to the content behind it because focus is not correctly "trapped" within the modal. They are stuck.
- Vague and Useless Link Text: A screen reader user navigates a page by listing all the links, but all they hear is "Click Here," "Read More," "Click Here," "Read More," with no context about where those links go.
- Color Contrast Failures: A user with low vision cannot read the text on your website because the light gray text on a white background does not have sufficient color contrast.
How Axiom Cortex Evaluates Accessibility Developers
Axiom Cortex is designed to find the engineers who have a deep, empathetic understanding of how users with disabilities experience the web. We test for the practical skills required to build applications that are usable by everyone. We evaluate candidates across four critical dimensions.
Dimension 1: Semantic HTML and ARIA
This is the foundation of web accessibility. This dimension tests a candidate's ability to use the correct HTML elements and ARIA attributes to give an application a clear, machine readable structure.
We provide a complex UI component and evaluate their ability to:
- Write Semantic HTML: Do they use
<nav>,<main>,<button>, and other semantic elements correctly, or do they build everything out of `div`s and `span`s? - Use ARIA Correctly: Can they use ARIA roles (`role="dialog"`) and states/properties (`aria-expanded="true"`) to make a custom JavaScript widget accessible? Do they also know when *not* to use ARIA (the first rule of ARIA is "don't use ARIA")?
Dimension 2: Keyboard Navigation and Focus Management
This dimension tests a candidate's ability to build an application that is fully operable without a mouse.
We present a dynamic component like a modal or a dropdown menu and evaluate if they can:
- Ensure Keyboard Accessibility: Can they demonstrate that every interactive element is reachable and operable using only the Tab, Enter, and Space keys?
- Manage Focus: When a modal opens, do they correctly move focus into it? When it closes, do they return focus to the element that opened it?
Dimension 3: WCAG Standards and Testing
An elite accessibility developer is fluent in the language of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).
We evaluate their knowledge of:
- The Core Principles (POUR): Can they explain the four core principles of accessibility: Perceivable, Operable, Understandable, and Robust?
- Automated and Manual Testing: Are they familiar with using automated testing tools (like Axe) to catch common issues? More importantly, do they know the limitations of these tools and how to perform manual testing with a screen reader (like VoiceOver or NVDA)?
From Legal Risk to a Competitive Advantage
When you staff your frontend team with engineers who have passed the Web Accessibility Axiom Cortex assessment, you are making a strategic investment in the quality of your product and the size of your addressable market. You are also significantly reducing your company's legal risk. An accessible product is a better product for everyone, and it is a non negotiable requirement for selling into enterprise and government markets. Our vetting for other frontend roles, like with React or Angular, incorporates these principles, ensuring a baseline of quality across all hires.