Heather Buchel

As I'm currently looking for my next role, I've had to do serious reflection on the work I actually want to do. My conclusion from this reflection is that teams generally don't hire for the work I really like, with some rare exceptions. This is why I almost always end up carving out my own space. Whenever I join a team, regardless of what the job...

I thought I'd make a list of things I wish I could go back and tell my younger self as a web developer who was just beginning to lean into web accessibility as part of her career path. For some context, I was a self taught web developer. I learned what I could from the internet. And my early career had me working more with back-end developers...

TLDR: At some point, we told design they couldn't sit with us anymore, and surprise! It backfired! Now, not only has the field and profession of web design suffered, but also, we build shitty websites. As I was writing this, I noticed how weird it felt using the term web designer. Isn't that weird? Also, I considered titling this "How the men...

A disclaimer to start this out: If you feel like I'm talking about you and this has you in your feelings, yes, I am. This weekend's discourse around accessibility validated my decisions to not carry out work there. I largely stopped posting on Twitter many months ago; minus the random check in, to reply to a peer's post, or just throw out a few...

No tool that asserts you can build production-grade UI code from their AI is innovative if it's not driven by accessibility. It's also not production-grade if the code it generates is inaccessible. That is the short and sweet of it. Not everyone is claiming that their AI tool is particularly innovative. But like most things involving AI right...

We've let ourselves get away from building websites that can do normal web things. I've noticed this a lot recently due to a surge in new social media platforms springing up. Everyone is building new clients, apps, and in some cases, like React Native, attempting to share code across platforms. It's definitely exciting, and I'm actually thrilled...

Recently, I took the State of CSS survey and they have this handy feature for each question where you can add that topic to a reading list. After you finish the survey, they send you an e-mail with links to articles about each topic. Wonderful! The last several years I've felt further and further pulled from the tech I really love: CSS and UI...

Some recent discourse regarding accessibility on BlueSky left me with some feelings about crowd sourcing your accessibility feedback. I'll copy that post here since BlueSky is still invite-only: I really hope BlueSky is paying the people spending time to collect and relay accessibility feedback that they've reached out to for guidance. Like this...

I think anyone who has lived on the internet for a long time has had this moment: when you finally decide to re-visit your personal site. If you work on the front-end in the web space, it probably gnaws at you weekly. Anyways, here is mine. I'm back at this for a few reasons: We're as of writing this, watching Twitter gut itself from the inside....