Scott Davis

Biography

Scott Davis is a principal engineer with ThoughtWorks, where he focuses on the leading-edge, innovative, emerging, and nontraditional aspects of web development, such as serverless web apps, mobile web apps (responsive PWAs), HTML5-based smart TV apps, conversational UIs (like Siri and Alexa), and using web technologies to build IoT solutions. He is also the founder of ThirstyHead.com, a Denver-based training and software development consultancy. Scott has been writing about web development for over 10 years. His books include Getting Started with Grails, Groovy Recipes, GIS for Web Developers, The Google Maps API: Adding Where to Your Web Applications, and JBoss at Work. He is also the author of several popular article series at IBM developerWorks, including Mastering MEAN, Mastering Grails, and Practically Groovy. His videos include Architecture of the MEAN Stack, Responsive Mobile Architecture, and On the Road to Angular 2. Scott is also the cofounder of the Denver HTML5 User Group.

On Accessibility: Bapu, MLK, and the Gang of 19

What if I told you that your website has a showstopper bug that is preventing 1 out of 4 people from using it? What if I told you that the same excluded user base has about $550 billion of disposable income (in the US alone - $8 trillion worldwide) that you are missing out on? Of course, I could also point out that your poorly written website is putting you at risk for a multi-million dollar lawsuit (over 10,000 US Accessibility lawsuits in 2019). But why should I scare you into writing better websites when I could entice you with the promise of dramatically better SEO, dramatically better mobile support, and dramatically better performance by simply using the web platform as it was designed and intended to be used? In this keynote, Scott Davis (Web Architect and Principal Engineer, ThoughtWorks) gives you simple, practical, actionable advice on how to improve the Accessibility of your website. You'll also hear plenty of real world case studies of companies that get web accessibility right, and plenty more of companies that don't. If you think this advice doesn't apply to you, WebAIM analyzed the top 1 million websites in 2019 and found that 98% of them had significant Accessibility issues. On average, there were 60 a11y errors per homepage, or 1 error for every 13 HTML elements on the page. And if you think your web framework might help you out of this bind, React-based websites had, on average, 10% more Accessibility errors; Angular-based websites had 20% more Accessibility errors; Vue-based websites had 25% more a11y errors. So, unless you are among the 2% who don't have significant website Accessibility issues, you might actually learn something. And if you are one of the lucky 2 percenters, perhaps you could attend this keynote anyway and tell me how you did it!