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Discussion on: How to make your code blocks accessible on your website

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whitep4nth3r profile image
Salma Alam-Naylor

Thanks for your comment! You raise some good questions.

I don't know where you are in the world, but there are laws in support of accessibility, for example in the EU, the European Accessibility Act was introduced in 2019 - ec.europa.eu/social/main.jsp?catId.... This might be really useful in helping get buy in from other areas of the profession.

With this article I was taking a broad accessibility approach and prioritising humans with regards to colour contrast and non-keyboard focusable elements. However, I've found quite a few articles that discuss search engines being able to more effectively crawl and index web pages that use best accessibility practises. For example, if your web page includes an audio file/movie file with no transcript or textual content, a search engine won't be able to 'understand it' and therefore won't be able to index it and/or rank it according to search terms. This might not be as relevant for optimising text code blocks for people who don't use a mouse, but however as we know, accessibility is a hugely broad issue.

What's interesting is I found this article from 2005 that feels like it was written much more recently - alistapart.com/article/accessibili... - because the nuances of it are still so relevant today - and maybe more so.

Thank you for spending all your days making sites accessible :)

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grahamthedev profile image
GrahamTheDev

Yeah I am aware of indirect improvements in SEO, just wondered if you had seen some case study where Google actively pushed items up its rankings because it was accessible, sadly it seems we are still not there yet.

Nice article you linked though, who knows maybe the next Google algorithm update after the "User Experience Update" coming in May will be the "Inclusion Update" and they will penalise sites for accessibility issues 😋