During my career, I was rarely asked to implement accessibility improvements, and even when I did, it was just to add a missing alt or add aria labels. I never had a chance to work on an accessibility feature in order to really change and improve the UX for people with disabilities.
So my question is primarily for people who rely heavily on accessibility features, but also to anyone else who wants to share any experience or advice on working on significant accessibility improvements.
The full question is:
Are you satisfied with the current state of accessibility on the web and what can we do to make your browsing experience easier?
and
How to approach the planning and implementation of accessibility features of a website or a web app?
Top comments (7)
As somebody with no disabilities: no.
I already often have issues using and navigating websites. Readability is often fixed by turning on the browser's reader mode. But a lot of websites have unclear action elements, and are riddled with annoying pop-overs and browser prompts.
Simple is generally better. Static content is generally better than dynamic (things that move around on your screen)
Thank you for sharing your thoughts and experiences.
I admit that it's tempting to go overboard with animations and cool effects to make your website as unique as possible. We definitely need to consider how these animations affect people with disabilities and their browsing experience.
Off the top of your head, which websites you find the most usable?
Slashdot for example. It's design is quite clean and simple. But most important, there is surprise on the interactive elements.
When scrolling on the site everything stays where it is. It even has proper keyboard navigation (although that requires reading the manual).
Dev.to is also good. There are a bunch of confusing interaction parts. But they are non-destructive. Like pressing the (?) when writing an article, it hides your editor which might seem like you did the horrible thing of navigating way and losing all your input. Or hovering over your avatar in the upper right produces a drop-down. But clicking on it suddenly dims the page.
Note, I do browse with adblockers. So I'm not sure how terrible websites become without those.
I had the same thoughts about the "?" button when I was writing the first few of my posts. And I never clicked on my avatar to see the page dim, that's curious.
I will check out Slashdot more in-depth and see what I can learn and apply to my everyday work.
No, and I don't even really have anything that would be a significant disability by most people's standards (astigmatism plus myopia (and light sensitivity and nystagmus if I'm particularly stressed out)).
Just to name a few things off the top of my head that I, as a 'normal' user have issues with:
beforeunloadevent in cases where it's not needed, though part of this is an issue with Chrome (removing all of your event listeners for the vent does not reliably prevent Chrome from showing the popup anyway).beforeunload). This one isn't even a hard one to fix either, it's literally a few dozen lines of JS plus some way to serialize your state.Given enough time, I could name dozens of other issues, but I'll just stop there for now...
Thank you for the detailed comment.
It's also true that people with no disabilities can also have a bad browsing experience due to bad accessibility. It's interesting to see that overlap and what issues are shared between people with disabilities and people without disabilities. For example, how you prefer to navigate websites with your keyboard and people who only can browse the site with keyboard due to their disability.
Government sites should be accessible by default. That is indeed a large problem. We have the same issue with most of the Croatian government sites as well.