Senior Frontend Engineer - Design Editing Accessibility
HybridSydney, New South Wales, Australia
Job Summary
Design and build accessible interactions in the Editor, focusing on focus management, keyboard navigation, live regions, and ARIA roles. Use screen readers like VoiceOver, NVDA, and JAWS daily to test, debug, and validate work, understanding their technical quirks and inconsistencies. Collaborate with engineers across the Editing Group to review designs and pull requests, providing technical guidance and resolving accessibility issues before they ship. Identify systemic gaps in the Editor and develop architectural solutions rather than patching individual instances. Work closely with assistive technology users and designers to co-design solutions, ensuring the Editor communicates effectively with users who rely on screen readers.
Required Qualifications
- solid commercial experience building accessible web applications
- good understanding of WCAG in practice
- hands-on experience developing with screen readers
- understanding of how VoiceOver, NVDA and JAWS behave technically
- comfortable debugging assistive technology interactions as part of the normal workflow
- ability to work effectively in a large, interconnected frontend codebase
- understanding of how components, state, and rendering interact
- approach to accessibility as something that needs to be designed into a system rather than applied to it
- strong proficiency in TypeScript and React
- ability to reason about component structure and accessibility together
- ability to communicate clearly across disciplines
- ability to explain the technical behaviour of a screen reader to an engineer who hasn't used one
- ability to explain the constraints of a complex component to a designer who's trying to get accessibility right
- ability to work in the Editor's architecture
- ability to design accessibility into complex, interconnected systems
- understanding of how things fit together before deciding where and how to make changes
Desired Qualifications
- experience with WAI-ARIA authoring patterns for complex widgets such as trees, grids, drag-and-drop interactions and dialogs
- experience building accessibility for complex interactions like streaming or real-time UI accessibility, HTML5 canvas, data visualisation, spreadsheets, WYSIWYG, etc.
- familiarity with browser and native accessibility APIs, including the accessibility tree and platform-specific behaviours
- experience building accessibility features utilising AI
- experience with mobile accessibility, including React Native
- prior experience working alongside dedicated accessibility specialists, assistive technology users, or user researchers focused on accessibility
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