Brian DeConinck, a white man in his mid-30s. He is wearing a sweatshirt and a jacket, and is standing in front of the ocean on a clear day.

My name is Brian DeConinck, and I am a digital accessibility specialist and front-end developer.

I work for Ad Hoc, where I support the accessibility efforts on VA.gov for the United States Department of Veterans Affairs.

What is accessibility?

Accessibility is the practice of ensuring that products, tools, and services work for people with disabilities.

Disabled people frequently face barriers that prevent them from entering spaces, participating in communities, and earning or spending money. These barriers are a failure of policy, design, and engineering, rather than any limitation intrinsic to disability. Especially when building digital tools, there’s no reason why we can’t provide an accessible and inclusive experience.

Professional approach

In addition to following WCAG standards, I apply inclusive design principles in my work and push for accessibility beyond compliance.

As a former front-end developer and former manager of a web services team, I have tremendous empathy for the designers and engineers who want to do what’s right for their users but may not have deep experience with accessibility. In my work, I aim to trust and empower my colleagues. I try to give people the ability to accomplish tasks, the training needed to understand their options, and the in-context feedback to make good choices. That means:

  • Designing and building digital tools and experiences that are centered on accessibility.
  • Helping product teams understand how their choices can lead to an inclusive experience.
  • Providing honest assessments of risk and impact, so teams can make informed decisions about how to prioritize work.
  • Building tools and processes that provide useful feedback as they complete their work.
  • Making good accessibility practices something easy to build into existing processes—embracing the shift left ethos and not playing “compliance cop” after the fact.

I do my best to make ethical design decisions. I believe we have an obligation to think about the consequences of how everything we build might be used—and when possible, to ensure that they won’t be used to hurt, exclude, or take advantage of. I think about Sara Wachter-Boettcher and Eric Meyer’s book Design for Real Life constantly.

Personal information

I am based in beautiful Chicago, Illinois, where I share my life with Dr. Emily Barnard, our son, and two cats. I dream of one day writing my novel, which I have previously described as “what if Contact but then nothing happens” but I promise there’s more to it than that.

In other media

I have given up on most social media, but you can still find content generated by me at:

  • The Writing section of this website. I don’t keep this as a long-term running public blog. Instead, I add and remove posts based on how useful or relevant I find them to be (or how much shame I feel when re-reading them). Think of it as a curated experience that’s theoretically more interesting for you.
  • LinkedIn. I’m not really a LinkedIn person, but I keep my profile up-to-date, occasionally check my messages there, and try to remember to post when my company is hiring for accessibility roles.
  • GitHub. I sometimes share code I’ve written and find useful, until it’s old enough that it’s embarrassing and I take it all down. I think that’s how open source is supposed to work, right?