Maggie Costello Wachs

(she/her)

Senior web accessibility specialist and people manager, well-versed in UX design principles and building accessible web sites and products.

Contact

maggie.wachs@gmail.com

+1 (617) 416-5111

References available upon request.

What I do

Advise on accessibility conformance and best practices

IAAP Certified Professional in Web Accessibility (CPWA)

Review UI designs, markup, content, and workflows for accessibility conformance to WCAG, usability, and overall performance. Streamline evaluation and reporting processes for continual improvement (ACRs). I train teams and advise individuals one-on-one on accessible practices and to facilitate issue remediation.

Document design systems and components

Understand a design system and ensure that its rules and exceptions are reflected in naming conventions and code organization. Prioritize accessibility conformance and practices. Write documentation that serves multiple audiences, from product owners to developers. (I spoke on this topic at SmashingConf NYC in 2019.)

Build accessible, responsive, and performant interfaces

Translate UI designs in the context of visual, functional, and accessibility requirements into responsive and accessible web interfaces. I've participated in the process from user research and design ideation to technical planning and development.

Where I've worked

CivicActions

civicactions.com

November 2022 - Present

Associate Director of Front-End Development

Manage five senior engineers in collaboration with project and company leadership to support their careers at CivicActions.

Provide coaching and support for day-to-day engineering work and longer term professional development goals. Conduct regular check-ins and performance reviews, provide direct feedback, implement improvement plans, and ensure compliance with company policy. Advise on project staffing and contribute to company initiatives, policy, and messaging. Assist sales efforts as an accessibility subject matter expert on contract wording and RFP responses.

Senior Web Accessibility Engineer

Web accessibility coding, evaluations, reporting and remediation.

Implement and maintain a replicable process for reporting on accessibility conformance across multiple web properties for the WECMS contract, including Medicare.gov, CMS.gov, Healthcare.gov, Data.Healthcare.gov, Data.Medicaid.gov, OpenPaymentsData.gov, and more. Evaluate websites using a combination of manual and automated tests according to WCAG-EM to ensure conformance to accessibility standards (WCAG), usability best practices and inclusive design, and generate reports using OpenACR (VPAT). Adept with automated accessibility tools to identify errors and continually improve code quality. Collaborate with product, design, and engineering teams throughout the development process.

Filament Group

filamentgroup.com

July 2003 - November 2022

Production Manager / Web Developer

Front-end development, writing, and design.

2017 - 2022: Consulted with client design and development teams to improve coding practices, planned and built pattern libraries (and usually most of the web components documented within), and wrote and presented training materials to introduce accessibility. Worked primarily with Vineyard Vines through 2020, and large-scale financial services companies.

2008 - 2016: Shifted from building and handing off code to more collaborative work with our clients' development teams (LEGO shop, Boston Globe, Vineyard Vines), and contributed regularly to JQuery and JQuery UI open source projects. Advocated within the web development community for progressive enhancement coding practices (co-wrote a book on it!).

Early 2000s: Developed mobile interfaces using web standards (Frito Lay handheld, Stop & Shop's Bluetooth-based Shopping Buddy), defined and documented design systems, and built and maintained web sites for long standing clients (ForestCity, now Brookfield Asset Management, Radius and Via Matta restaurants, Byggmeister homebuilders).

(My apartment & coffee shops)

Spring 2001 - Fall 2003

Freelance front-end development.

Built and maintained web sites, coded marketing emails, and augmented engineering staff. Clients included Timberland, Empirix (now Hammer), and the non-profit Hyde Square Task Force, among others.

ZEFER Boston

Spring 1999 - Spring 2001

Quality assurance / front-end development.

Tested and built web sites for Siemens and Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (CIBC).

Skills & tools

Accessibility testing

VoiceOver, NVDA, Narrator; familiar with JAWS

axe-core, alfa, Puppeteer, Cypress, Siteimprove API

Axe DevTools, Accessibility Insights, ANDI, Lighthouse

Section 508, WCAG, WAI-ARIA, WCAG-EM, ATAG

Front-end development

HTML, CSS, JavaScript, TypeScript, web standard APIs

StencilJS, Vue/Nuxt, Lit/LitElement, Eleventy, Jest; familiar with React, Drupal front-end

SASS, Tailwind

Node/npm, Homebrew, Yarn

Design, documentation, & collaboration

Figma / Figjam, Adobe Creative Suite, JSDoc, Storybook

Confluence, Jira, Salesforce, Mural

What I've written

Articles

Upcoming: Accessibility Conformance Reports 101

24 Accessibility, to be published December 2026

Measuring the Impact of Manual Accessibility Testing

CivicActions accessibility blog, January 2024

Building forms with custom elements

Filament Group blog, June 2022

Conference talk

A book

Interests & miscellany

Education

Cornell University

Bachelor of Science in Human Development, 1998

Research assistant at the Lab of Experimental Psychopathology and Cornell Institute for Research on Children. Kappa Alpha Theta.

Community involvement

Educational Farm at Joppa Hill

Volunteer, Summer 2021 - Present

Horse barn maintenance and animal care. Favorite residents: Bessie (mini donkey), Suzie (Haflinger pony), John Ham and Kevin Bacon (kunekune pigs), and Manny and Juno (barn cats).

School District Clerk (SAU #25)

Elected term, 2022 - 2025

Approved leases and expenditures, assisted Bedford town officials with school ballot measures and elections.

Town of Bedford Conservation Commission

Chair, 2020 - 2021; Board member, 2017 - 2020

Worked with town Planning & Zoning, local residents, and businesses on compliance with environmental ordinances.