Senior Accessibility Specialist
Who we are
Realtor.com is your one stop shop for homebuyers, sellers, renters, and dreamers, with comprehensive for-sale listings, insightful information, valuable tools, and professional expertise. We're excited and hungry to make a difference to the millions of people in the US who buy a home each year. Our aspiration starts with treating our home buyer as our focal point - we believe that delivering on experiences that truly help people through this seemingly difficult life event will lead us to continued and greater success as a company.
Summary
At Realtor.com we believe that everyone deserves a safe place to call home.
To achieve our vision we’re building the Inclusive Design and Accessibility program. We need designers, researchers, content designers, and accessibility specialists who are passionate about creating meaningful experiences that are usable by everyone. This goal is big, but essential to our mission and our core values.
The Accessibility team is responsible for providing accessibility expertise throughout the organization, which includes consulting, advising on product planning and reviews, helping to train staff, and representing the company to the community at large. In partnership with the Inclusive Design team, they will help engineers, designers, and product managers understand what does and doesn’t work from our consumer’s or employee’s perspective.
Role
We’re hiring a Senior Accessibility Specialist to be a driving force on an innovation team that creates products and services that consider individuals with disabilities and that work for everyone. Accessibility also applies to those in limiting situations and is all about inclusion and designing for diverse groups of users, so developing creative solutions within the constraints of accessibility restrictions will be a key, but exciting challenge of this role. Our Senior Accessibility Specialists will contribute to the long-term accessibility vision and its implementation in addition to short-term operational objectives.
You’ll take a collaborative approach as you work with multiple product teams to ensure that their systems, applications, and experiences are meeting accessibility standards. Over the course of the first year there will be quite a bit of auditing and testing, but as our accessibility maturity grows you’ll be guiding and helping teams proactively instead of telling teams what is wrong after testing. As we grow, this role will also be expected to coach and mentor other specialists on the team.
This role will report directly to the Sr. Director of Product Design, Inclusive Design and Accessibility.
Responsibilities
- Front line for maintaining the accessibility vision across the organization by ensuring consistency to approach between teams
- Partner with Inclusive Design and Accessibility leadership to ensure consistency and forward thinking for the accessibility program
- Develop and execute against a long-term accessibility vision, while ensuring successful completion of short-term operational goals
- Design, develop, test, deploy, maintain and improve software
- Help engineers to write solid, maintainable, well tested client code
- Provide clear and understandable accessibility feedback to designers and engineers
- Manage individual project priorities, deadlines, and deliverables
- Conduct design reviews and code reviews
- Conduct accessibility testing on Realtor.com and other Move Inc. properties
- Contribute to the Design System, directly or indirectly, on the creation of accessible components
- Write and maintain clear, smart accessibility documentation for engineering squads to consume
- Help manage accessibility priorities and how they ladder up company-wide initiatives foundationally across the organization
- Partner closely with the front-end web enablement team
- Work across the organization to help drive the adherence and implementation of key compliance guidelines including identifying opportunities to increase effectiveness
- Assist accountable parties (technology, journey owners) to interpret accessibility audit reports and identify root causes of defect creation and monitor remediation of those root causes
- Partner with groups across the consumer bank to share best practices for digital accessibility
- Mentor and coach other accessibility specialists
Qualifications
- Bachelor’s degree or equivalent work experience
- 3+ years of experience with digital accessibility and/or inclusive design
- 3+ years of experience in assistive technologies and screen readers
- 3+ years of experience with accessibility standards for all platforms (web, mobile, desktop) and how they apply to products and services
- 3+ years of experience working across teams and successfully communicating with engineering and design teams on key initiatives
- Experience with iOS, Android, JavaScript, HTML, CSS, WAI-ARIA, WCAG 2.1 (or higher)
- Interested in gaining experience in inclusive and/or accessible research
- Passion for technology, accessibility and overall quality of Realtor.com and Move Inc.’s products and services
- Empathy and compassion for consumers and partners, and for resolving the barriers they face while using our products
- Experience working and partnering directly with communities of consumers with disabilities and driving change into products and services
- Strong interpersonal skills with the ability to work collaboratively with diverse project teams and across functional areas
- Familiarity in working with design systems (desirable, not mandatory)
- Experience with front-end UI/UX development (desirable, not mandatory)
About realtor.com
At realtor.com®, we believe that everyone deserves a home of their own. We’re a community of nearly 2,000 employees who work hard to ensure that from the moment someone starts dreaming about a new home, to the moment they walk in the door and beyond, we’re there to lend a helping hand. Every month, over 85 million people trust us with their journey home by visiting our site and mobile apps, and we’d love to have you join our team to help.
We’ve got great offices in the U.S. and Canada with lots of sweet jobs to choose from, so we’re hoping you’ll join us on our journey to make buying, selling, renting, and living in homes easier and more rewarding for everyone.
Let’s make a difference, together. For Real.