Hire Front-End Developers

Most accessibility problems are not exotic. They are buttons built from divs that cannot be reached with a keyboard, form fields without labels, low-contrast text, modals that let focus escape behind them, and single-page apps that change the whole screen without telling a screen reader anything happened. A front-end developer who reaches for semantic HTML first and ARIA only when there is no native element avoids most of them before a tester ever sees the page.

Automated checkers such as axe are worth running in CI, but they only catch a portion of real issues. Ask candidates how they test manually: navigating a flow with only the keyboard, checking the focus order, and checking the labels and roles that assistive technology relies on. Someone who has done this regularly can describe what they found and how they fixed it; someone who has not will talk only about the tooling.

Google measures page experience through three Core Web Vitals: Largest Contentful Paint for loading, Interaction to Next Paint for responsiveness, and Cumulative Layout Shift for visual stability. Interaction to Next Paint replaced First Input Delay in 2024 and is harder to pass, because it looks at every interaction during a visit rather than just the first. Heavy JavaScript, long tasks on the main thread and expensive hydration are the usual causes of a poor score.

A good engineer distinguishes lab data from field data. Lighthouse runs on a fast machine under controlled conditions; the Chrome User Experience Report and your own real-user monitoring show what visitors on mid-range phones and patchy networks actually experience. The practical fixes are well known - correctly sized and prioritised images, reserved space for media and embeds, code splitting, deferring third-party scripts and breaking up long tasks - and the habit that keeps them fixed is a performance budget enforced in the build.

Implementing a design system is a different job from implementing screens. It means translating colour, spacing and typography into design tokens, designing component APIs that are hard to misuse, documenting each component and its states, and supporting theming such as dark mode without duplicating styles. Accessibility belongs inside the components, so every team that uses the button or the dialog gets correct keyboard and screen-reader behaviour for free.

Look for experience with component documentation tools such as Storybook, visual regression testing, and versioning a shared library so product teams can upgrade without surprises. The warning sign is a codebase full of near-identical one-off components; the fix is usually an incremental consolidation, not a rebuild.

React, Vue and Angular are all capable of building large products, so framework choice is mostly about your team, your hiring market and what you already run. The decision that matters more is how pages are rendered. Server rendering and static generation, through meta-frameworks such as Next.js, Nuxt or Angular's own server rendering, send useful HTML on the first request, which helps both search engines and slow devices. Client-side rendering suits authenticated, highly interactive applications.

When you assess a front-end developer, ask them to explain a rendering decision they made and what it cost: bundle size, server load, caching complexity or SEO. Engineers who can reason about those trade-offs will make good choices in whatever framework you use; engineers who only know one way to build a page will apply it everywhere.