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Discussion on: How Should Keyboard Navigation Work in Web Applications?

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jenbutondevto profile image
Jen • Edited

Thanks for your article(s) on accessibility! It's easy to look over these things especially when you or your team don't have disabilities. I do consultancy work in UK Government where public sector services need to be accessible, so projects often have a budget for accessibility testing which isn't a luxury for some.

Government Digital Service ran an audit on automated checkers and it turns out they're pretty bad at catching accessibility barriers 😅 but I think they're a good first step if WCAG 2.1 compliance hasn't been thought about at all. (GDS's results are here ➡️ alphagov.github.io/accessibility-t...)

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s_aitchison profile image
Suzanne Aitchison

Amazing - thank you for sharing that, it's very interesting to see the data collected together like that. I'm definitely going to take a bit more time to read through the detail - some things you can expect an automated tool not to pick up due to the nuance, but very interesting to see even things like contrast ratio being missed in such a large proportion of audit tools!

I totally agree, an automated checker should be used only as a kind of "initial check" to filter out any obvious issues before the code gets as far as code review or test. These tools can easily miss things, especially when the real test is the overall experience, not a box checking exercise. And there are some things I don't think an automated tool could ever assess in place of a human, e.g. whether or not alternative text is actually conveying what it should in the given situation.