Accessibility is a hiring signal

I interview engineers for accessibility roles, but I also ask accessibility questions when I interview for general frontend roles. Not to disqualify people. To see how they think about users who are not in the room.

The strongest answer I hear is not a list of WCAG numbers. It is a story about a bug that reached production and what changed afterward. Keyboard traps, focus loss after a modal closes, a contrast fix that broke a disabled state.

The weakest answer is we have an audit twice a year. An audit is a photograph. Accessibility is a practice, and practices show up in code review, in component APIs, and in what gets blocked before release.

If a team cannot tell you who owns accessibility, that is the answer. A named owner and a CI check beat a 90-page report. Ask to see both.

Hiring for it looks unglamorous: ask people to debug a broken form with a screen reader, then watch what they notice first. The ones who notice the label usually notice everything else too.