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There’s a lot that web designers and web developers have to consider when creating user interfaces and user experiences — everything from making text decipherable for low-vision readers to focusing content for users with motor impairments who primarily use the keyboard (two examples from Google’s accessibility developer docs). The guidelines are fundamentally a set of standards developers and designers should refer to to make sure they’re creating accessible web content. For instance, when including an image in your website, use the `alt` attribute of the `img` element to provide a description of the image. According to the Bureau of Accessibility’s article How to Create Accessible Content and Designs for People with Dyslexia, using simple fonts, keeping text decoration to a minimum, and having an ample amount of space between paragraphs and lines can help the reader process information.

The Community Civic Hacknight in Chicago, for example, encourages people with tech skills to work on ongoing projects like Chicago Councilmatic. At Progressive Hacknight, participants work on projects like visualizations of public election data, Covid data mapping, and Spoke, which is an open source tool for organizations to communicate actionable information to voters, supporters, or members. Usually, the repo will contain information on existing projects powered by the API such as these open source projects powered by the Open Civic Data API. Year after year, people look to Big Tech’s employment demographics hoping to see a shift towards greater diversity in the industry — yet demographics haven’t changed substantially, and people of color are still marginalized.

If you’re looking into tech education programs, it’s likely you’ve come across schools that market income share agreements (ISAs) as a way to pay. The way ISAs work in practice depends on a lot of factors that vary from school to school, including: the percentage of the student’s income the school takes, the total cap on the amount that needs to be paid back, and the repayment time frame. If a school doesn’t make a profit until their students land jobs, that gives the school more incentive to be invested in their students’ careers and create a strong program that will make their students successful. With General Assembly’s Catalyst ISA program, for instance, you don’t need to pay back your tuition until you’re earning at least $40,000 (no matter where you live or what the cost of living is).

Standard questions to ask in interviews Once you’ve done some of the research to figure out where your prospective company publicly stands, the next step is to address any questions you have directly with a hiring manager, most likely during the interview process. It’s not business as usual, and although you’ll want to ask a lot of the same questions in a job interview as you would in “normal” times, you will see many of them through a different lens as a woman of color. As a woman of color, TeLisa Daughtry, Founder & CEO of FlyTechnista has learned over her 10-year career in tech that it’s not enough to ask questions about job responsibilities and work-life balance. If you’re especially concerned about fitting in as a woman or woman of color, try to arrange a sit down or call with a woman or woman of color if possible, and start with these questions.