Shapes to Sound: Making a Visual Design Tool Accessible for Screen Reader Users

Visual design tools occupy a strange corner of the web. They’re not documents. They’re not forms. They’re two-dimensional, spatially laid out, real-time collaborative authoring surfaces, and almost none of the accessibility patterns the web has developed over the past two decades are designed to solve for this problem. This talk is a case study in what happens when you decide to tackle it anyway.

Sarah Federman

Sarah Federman is a Staff Frontend Engineer on the Editing Accessibility team at Canva. As a designer turned engineer, she focuses on bringing her multidisciplinary mindset and systems thinking to tackle accessibility issues holistically. Her background in design systems, experience working on enterprise design tools, and lived neurodivergent experience help to bring a unique lens to the team.