The primary question I get from developers is “How do I get my clients on board” or sometimes “How do I convince my boss that it’s worth invest...
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It's too bad that the legal angle is currently the most likely way to get buy-in from management.
It's also unfortunate what these legal disputes could do if used as a weapon to shut down small teams with less resources, when wieled by corporate legal teams. I'm thinking of teams of devs that are already under pressure and don't have the tools or know-how to quickly implement accessibility into their projects. They could be shut down too easily.
There's a big need and a big opportunity here: to make accessibility easier to implement for every developer by making the knowledge more available and by building dev tools that can help make the job easier.
I'm really thankful for auditing tools such as Google's Lighthouse. I had read about accessibility but it seemed very complicated to me. ARIA attributes, form labels, contrast ratios?? But when you're able to click one button and get an itemized list of everything to fix and how to do it, suddenly it's not so hard. I was able to get a site which was not created with accessibility in mind at all, to 100% compliant, in an afternoon 😀
YAY! I love hearing that!!!
I'm thinking of challenges like understanding the various ARIA roles and the differences between them, and many developers don't even know that ARIA roles exist because they've never needed to implement them.
Then knowing which ones to use for each of your custom UI controls, and maintaining it all as your UI changes.
What happens if the accessibility attributes get out of sync with the UI because a new developer hasn't been onboarded about accessibility yet? Are incorrect accessibility attributes worse than not having accessibility attributes at all? This is the kind of question that's on my mind when I think about the potential difficulties.
@marek , I am working on creating some course content on this, but I also did an ARIA presentation a year or so ago about some of this nuance.
Amazing, thank you for sharing that.
Out of curiosity, what do you find difficult about implementing accessibility?
I find it very simple to implement because a large part of accessibility is using semantic HTML. There's also plenty of dev tools that already exist!
Thanks for sharing!
Thank you for adding your voice to this issue. Accessibility is the right thing to do, always.
Did that happen with the IRL ADA?
long-time lurker here! I joined dev.to specifically so I could comment on your post.
The most effective way I have found to get buy in is to get devs and stakeholders into an environment where they're using a screenreader to navigate their own website.
I agree with all your points - and I'll add to your last. Accessible HTML affects all your users. Google's SEO looks at alt tags, which is a necessity for screen readers but will also help bubble up your website in search results.
Yes, very true! I want to learn more about SEO in general so I can start making more parallels for this!
Also thank you for being a reader! Love hearing feedback :)
Thank you for this. I’m a mobile developer wanting to make my iOS app as accessible as possible, but I find myself stumbling not on the technicalities of coding it, but the actual verbiage I should be using to describe UI elements to the vision impaired... do you know of any good articles on this? As a person without sight issues, I don’t feel like I’m qualified to say what would be most helpful for these users.
Hey Cary,
Honestly, instead of using Articles, I would try turning on Voiceover on if you're using an iPhone.
This is a good video of learning to get started on how to use it and how to turn it on. It's built into iOS :)
Thank you for the reply! The video is definitely helpful, but I guess I'm wondering if there's any info out there written by folks with visual disabilities, about how to name UI elements etc, so that an app or webpage is easy to use for them?
I feel like i'm missing the non-technical part of the discussion—which naming conventions, etc, I should use for my UI elements. ie, do I describe what a button does, or just call it a "completion button." The nitty-gritty stuff of actual implementation I guess.
To be honest, I am not an iOS developer, so I hope this doesn't get lost in translation. But I would say try your best to not overanalyze how elements render. Ultimately, whatever you do the best thing you can do for a11y is to render things that are semantic. For example,
<button>and<main>are semantic and<div>is not. If you use the most semantic rendering, screen readers tend to take away a lot of the heavy lifting for you.There is some nuance with more custom components and this is where manual testing and learning common screen reader commands come in handy. (Stay tuned for this, this will be my next post)
Thank you! I look forward to your next post!
A great defence of accessibility!
I think this should be $100,000 loss unless I've misunderstood.
I am talking about if you look back at the month with an inaccessible site and you made $500,0000. If you made that accessible you could be making more in potential revenue. That would make the 500k 80% of the revenue they could have had.
Yes, of course. I was working it out backwards 😅
haha yeah I get that!
Thanks Lindsey! Definitely going to refer to this post at some point in the future, since accessibility has often been an afterthought in my past experience :-/
How's the accessibility level of major CMS systems? Do you have some data about that? A lot of webpages out there are built with those and it would help a lot if such tools and their plugins were accessible by design.
I know that it's a high priority for the Drupal Core team (as I used to be a Drupal Developer). They did their best to make things accessible out of the box which I appreciated!
Here are a few links on Drupal a11y
WordPress I am not quite as certain about, but I do know that the WordPress Accessibility Lead resigned due to major accessibility flaws with Gutenberg that weren't getting resolved. I don't know what the progress has been since then.
Unfortunately, a lot of accessibility flaws are introduced when people start custom theming things. It might not matter how accessible it is out of the box if someone still customizes it without accessibility in mind.
Nice!
Yeah, there's that 😞
You should mention also WCAG authoring practices. They are very useful.
Yep! WCAG is what I use for everything now.
This is awesome, accessibility is so important, this is a great distillation of why!
Also, by the way, the timing of my post is interesting, because Dominoes lost an a11y legal case for their app and site being inaccessible.