Valerie Young
Open Web Engineer at Igalia
Oakland, California, United States
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolValerie Young is an Open Web Engineer with 13 years of experience building and testing accessible web standards and implementations, currently working at Igalia and co-chairing the W3C ARIA working group. She combines front-end development, QA and test automation expertise—contributing to high-profile projects like the WAI-ARIA Authoring Practices Guide and the ECMAScript Test262 suite—to improve accessibility, conformance, and testability of interactive components. Valerie’s background spans consulting and product work (Bocoup), large-scale reproducible-builds and EMR modernization, showing a knack for untangling legacy systems and turning specs into reliable test suites. Based in Oakland, she champions free software, usable encryption, and non-hierarchical collaboration, bringing both technical rigor and community-first values to standards and open-source ecosystems.
13 years of coding experience
8 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science (B.S.), Computer Science, Physics, Bachelor of Science (B.S.), Computer Science, Physics at Boston University
Github Skills (10)
accessibility10
html10
ria10
javascript10
bigint10
wai-aria10
ecmascript10
testing10
typed-array9
css9
Programming languages (11)
Github contributions (5)
w3c/aria
Aug 2021 - Oct 2022
Accessible Rich Internet Applications (WAI-ARIA)
Role in this project:
QA Engineer / Test Automation Engineer
QA Engineer / Test Automation EngineerContributions:217 reviews, 13 commits, 103 PRs in 1 year 2 months
Contributions summary:Valerie primarily contributed to the validation tests within the aria repository. Their work involved creating and updating test files for various ARIA roles and attributes, ensuring compliance with accessibility standards. Key contributions included adding tests for combobox and other ARIA elements, as well as fixing bugs and adding output files for automated testing tools like AXE and validator.nu. They also collaborated with other developers in these tasks, focusing on enhancing the test suite's coverage and accuracy.
wai-aria
w3c/aria-practices
Jul 2018 - Oct 2021
WAI-ARIA Authoring Practices Guide (APG)
Role in this project:Front-end Developer
Front-end DeveloperContributions:104 reviews, 52 commits, 136 PRs in 3 years 4 months
Contributions summary:Valerie's primary contribution focused on enhancing the WAI-ARIA Authoring Practices Guide (APG) by adding data attributes to HTML elements within example pages. These additions, primarily involving `data-test-id` attributes, aimed to facilitate automated regression testing. The user modified various example pages, including menubar, combobox, treeview, tabs, and grid examples, indicating a focus on improving the testability and maintainability of the APG's interactive components.
wai-ariaariacss
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