Accessibility jobs

Who is working in Accessibility now?

subway to workIt was intriguing to read Webaim’s July,  2014 survey results of accessility practioners. Vast oversimplification: 900 respondents, 90% of respondents work in US or Europe, 1/2 of them work in accessibility as a “primary” part of their jobs, however @ 60% of them work on accessibility less than 20 hours a week. Only 22% said they were developers and only ~4% said they were QA professionals. These numbers will get interesting later in this article. Median salaries were between $60k and $80k but fluctated widely depending on amount of time spent in accessibility, education levels, and industry (government/ corporation/ consultancy).

Reading (and participating) in the survey started me wondering if the field is getting more exposure. Are there really more jobs? What industries are looking to pay salaries to people with accessibility related skills?

So I set out to answer some basic questions. How many jobs are there in Accessibility? What kinds of skills are employers looking for? What is the growth potential in the market?

Gathering stats on accessibility jobs

Query on www.indeed.com on October 25, 2015 using “%Accessibility%” in the title. No limits on location other than the United States. There were 107 results, some of which were redundant. Multiple recruiters were hawking the same position. Culling for duplicates I found 80 jobs. They are heavily weighted to IT (half were for developers or QA professionals), almost ¼ were management or administrative positions and the final ¼ were a mix of electronics, UI/UX, technical workers.

When I searched more broadly within indeed.com using just the term ‘accessibility’ to pick up any jobs using the word in their descriptions I found 11,442 jobs. Unfortunately, many of these job descriptions include a phrase like “if you need accessibility accommodations to apply for this job, please contact <email and or phone number>” In other words, the jobs are NOT about accessibility.  Other off track uses of “accessibility” or words that stem from it are: “Access” databases, job includes enticing ”access” to areas of beaches, skiing or other amenities or job duties include “providing access to systems for onboarding new employees”.

The jobs that truly include some skills or expectations of understanding about This confirms our finding of the 80 jobs on indeed.com which used the word in the title. More and more development opportunities include a mention of accessibility, especially for front end and full stack developers. Even though it is still rare to see the proper skills taught in computer science classes, the subject might be mentioned in boot camps. Anecdotally, developers just run across a request to “make the site accessible”, leading to them doing whatever research they are capable of and/ or have time for.

Query on www.linkedin.com on October 25, 2015. Same criteria as above. Job title contains “%Accessibility%”= 58 results. Keyword contains “accessibility” = 5,303 results. Again, roughly half were development or QA jobs, about a quarter could be cast as management/ administrative and the last quarter didn’t fit neatly into any category, thus we’ll call them “other” for the moment. Again, most of the jobs in the larger data set either reference the employers willingness to provide specialized accessibility support for their candidates or include some other use of “access” which is not relevant to our search.

Skills requested

What are employers looking for? From job descriptions:

Developers:

“If HTML, JavaScript and CSS make you want to get out of the bed in the morning, this is probably  a good job for you.” – SSB BART Group, San Francisco

“Experience preferred in WAI-ARIA, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, AngularJS (optional)” contract in Richmond, VA

QA testers:

“Screen readers, voice recognition, html/ CSS. Knowledge of industry standards and regulations (WCAG 2.0). Use of automated testing tools.” contract in Richmond, VA

“Be able to educate and guide engineers in best practices. Use and help improve existing processes.” Redmond, WA

Accessibility Lead:

“BA in HCI, Engineering or equivalent professional experience. Thorough knowledge of Accessibility guidelines. 5 years experience creating accessible products and using assistive technology. Three years native mobile experience with iOS/Android/ Win8/ web mobile expe

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