Introduction

Welcome to my little corner of the web! I’m Johannes, a software engineer at iteratec, living in Freiburg, Germany.

I wanted to start a blog many times over the years, but I never quite found the right topics or approach to make it happen. I think this has changed.

A Brief History

Before going into the details of what has changed, let me give you a quick overview of the experience I’ve gained on the projects I’ve worked on over the years.

After graduating from university (I studied mathematics in Freiburg), I joined iteratec and was fortunate to work on web performance early on. Our team developed OpenSpeedMonitor, a tool for monitoring web performance, which was utilising WebPageTest. We used that tooling to help our clients to improve their web performance, and so I learned a lot about web development and especially the browser, which led to my appreciation of the web platform.

Unfortunately, we couldn’t continue our journey in web performance, but this gave me the opportunity to work directly on projects with clients.

Since then, I’ve been involved in a variety of projects – different team sizes, diverse industries, and a wide range of technologies. However, one constant throughout my career has been my love for frontend development, even when a project had little to no frontend work involved.

The Spark

Most of the projects I’ve worked on were internal company applications or business-to-business (B2B) solutions, where accessibility was rarely a priority. As a result, I never had much exposure to the topic.

That changed a while ago when we started a project from scratch and had the freedom to choose our tech stack. We decided to try Tailwind CSS. Since accessibility-related utility classes, like sr-only, are built into the framework, this made me think: why not incorporate accessibility from the beginning?

So, I read a few articles, and we made an effort to implement accessibility in the project, from the get-go. But after that, accessibility faded into the background again. Still, it never completely left my mind.

Fast Forward to 2024.

Now back to the question at hand: what gave me the push to actually start this blog?

At the start of 2024, I had the opportunity to dive into the European Accessibility Act. This reignited my interest in accessibility and this time I wanted to learn the fundamentals and get hands on. I completed the fantastic course of Sara Soueidan, called Practical Accessibility. If you have the chance to take it as well, I cannot recommend it enough.

That’s also when I realized: the accessibility efforts in our past project were nowhere near as effective as I had believed. I was hooked. And so I started to dig deeper.

Now, in March 2025, I’m committed to making the web as accessible as possible for everyone. And that passion is what finally pushed me to start this blog.

Let’s see where this journey takes us!