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> "Personally, this one blows my mind - it it still somehow not a core requirement of being a front end developer. It should be a core skill, the default on any

> "Personally, this one blows my mind - it it still somehow not a core requirement of being a front end developer. It should be a core skill, the default on any frontend developers resume." Not sure if I agree with this. Ideally, this would be the case, but the tooling and dominant platforms just aren't as mature as they would need to be to consider it a required core skill. Doing Accessibility work feels like doing CSS work back in the late 90s. The dominant target platform, JAWS, is just a horribly coded product. It kinda, sorta, handles ARIA attributes and it kinda, sorta, does the same thing each time a page is loaded, but then also doesn't. And it's a very expensive tool. The "pro" version, which is the only version approved for dev work is $1100 (outside of the extended 90 trial for $179, I guess). Now consider that not only do your devs need copies, but so do your testers. And if they want to stay up to date, you're really looking more like $1100 + $550 a year. And, yes, there's other options, but since a lot of accessibility work is really more for lawsuit avoidance than anything else, not going with the industry standard isn't a wise choice. And, after all of that, unless you work someplace with enough funds to properly test out your product with, you know, actual users with visual impairment, what qualifies as good accessibility is difficult to suss out. You can run automated tools, but they're just code linting tools, more or less, and really speak nothing to the user experience. How do you really test out the UI you've developed? If you close your eyes or cover the screen you still know exactly what it looks like.

heartbreak 9y ago
> And it's a very expensive tool. The "pro" version, which is the only version approved for dev work is $1100 Which brings us to one of the author's other points: Not everyone is rich. There are many solo web developers who simply don't have the resources available to make their website accessible. Do we (in the U.S.) need an ADA for websites? We essentially applied it to government websites, but my personal blog doesn't have to be compliant. Regulation of that nature would have an immediate impact on solo and other small web developers, just like GDPR. Perhaps it's necessary, though, so that we aren't excluding wide swaths of people from having equal opportunities on the web. Edit: Note that certain interpretations (including court opinions) of ADA apply the public accommodation concept to business websites. I'm not aware of such an interpretation for personal websites as ADA would probably not apply.
- bandrami 9y ago
  I think laws and enforcement are the wrong way to look at it. A small business doesn't have to spend money developing tooling and a framework to, e.g., make asynchronous database calls and update page data without a refresh. The community developed that because the community cares about it. The community has shown significantly less caring about persons with disabilities being able to use websites. If the developer community had developed the accessibility version of AJAX we would use it just like we use AJAX.
- logfromblammo 9y ago
  > There are many solo web developers who simply don't have the resources available to make their website accessible. All HTML and JS documentation is available gratis, and every operating system is distributed with a text editor. <html> <head> <title>Accessible Web Page</title> </head> <body> <p>This is an accessible web page.</p> </body> </html> Perhaps you meant to specify rapid, tool-assisted development of a feature-rich website? Making an accessible website is simple as dirt. It will just look dated to people who don't need to rely on the accessibility features of their browser or OS. It may even "look" dated to people who use screen-readers.
  - gnode 9y ago
    The plain HTML example is a bit of a straw-man. It's beyond "dated", being a faux pas for all but the most ascetic of users. My interpretation of "resources" here would be time / money. Making sure a site is accessible by everyone takes effort which is difficult to justify, particularly if you're already stretched to capacity.
    - logfromblammo 9y ago
      That's a way of saying that accessibility is a low priority. Everyone has a choice between finally making the site usable for a minority of potential users, or putting in a new feature. If you always choose the option that makes the most money, some people always get left out. The ADA was drafted to force physical businesses to make reasonable access a higher priority. Accessibility has the same time/money costs as any other feature. The same goes for internationalization and localization. Or for robust user data protection and security. The longer you wait to consider doing it, the more it's going to cost you.
mars4rp 9y ago
You can use NVDA, it is a free, OS and it does the job!
bandrami 9y ago
> but the tooling and dominant platforms just aren't as mature as they would need to be to consider it a required core skill Then incent a generation of 19 year olds to fix that, rather than build yet another JavaScript library dependency resolution tool. I think she is spot on: the tooling and libraries are weak because the developer community just doesn't care.
- epicide 9y ago
  Of course the community doesn't care. You can spend your time learning to make a better visually designed project or spend your time learning to make an accessible project. You can't do both (to the same degree and in the same amount of time) and one is way more likely to make a difference in your likelihood to get a job. I agree that the community should care but am not at all surprised that hardly anybody does. There's no incentive to do so. I'm not saying it's solely on businesses to make people care. They don't have the incentives, either. This is where regulations might've helped.
  - wwweston 9y ago
    > There's no incentive to do so Well, the incentives to do so aren't obvious. Having worked on a bunch of (a) web applications with no dynamic client behavior to speak of (b) SPAs that are essentially a dynamic client talking to a service layer speaking JSON and/or XML (c) things in between... I think I've noticed a pattern, and it's that web applications where people take the time to think about how things would work with no dynamic client behavior, going through a process that more or less represents domain logic as HTTP operations on resources that can be represented as HTML (among other representations), these applications end up being more legible over time than projects with client engineering/experience as most of the focus. Not all applications fit this model, so there are limits to the approach. And accessibility is a somewhat different domain. But the concerns overlap, so one tl;dr might be this: Site accessibility is one canary in the web application mines. If it's dead, you might be accumulating technical debt.
Animats 9y ago
US web sites don't have to worry about "accessibility" any more. The Trump Administration moved enforcement in that area to the "inactive" category last year.[1] [1] https://www.adatitleiii.com/2017/07/doj-places-website-rulemaking-on-the-inactive-list/ https://www.adatitleiii.com/2017/07/doj-places-website-rulem...
- talmand 9y ago
  Anything one president changes can be changed back by the next president. I would follow the guidelines regardless.
- extra88 9y ago
  Hardly, most of the risk to organizations is from citizens lawsuits, not federal regulatory enforcement. There are more lawsuits than ever and as judgements and settlements have been almost entirely on the side of making sites more accessible, the risk of continuing to provide an inaccessible site increases.
simion314 9y ago
As a developer you can design with more empathy, here are a few tips that are not expensive and I and other people with disabilities or even healthy persons would appreciate: -allow the usage of the application without the mouse(if it is a painting app then maybe skip this), so don't break the navigation with Tab key, allow selecting buttons and activating them with the keyboard, if you have a search input allow me to press Enter to start and not to hit a search button with the mouse, try to allow the users customizing the key bindings(depends if your app needs key bindings) -don't use horrible colors for fonts, like light gray on white background, even if it feels readable on your screen other screens differ so better use some more contrast -if you make a mobile or desktop application use the user defined colors and font sizes, test your app with the larger font sizes and see how it looks.
sampleinajar 9y ago
> "Doing Accessibility work feels like doing CSS work back in the late 90s." Agreed. One of my first positions was doing accessibility on a government agency's app because no one else wanted to. It was a horrible, bloated legacy app with an antiquated UI framework that did not support most Accessibility features natively, so it was a lot of JQuery DOM manipulation (per my supervisor's suggestion) to rewrite CSS. I still have nightmares.
extra88 9y ago
There are very few problems that you could create that would effect JAWS users but not users of free screen readers like NVDA or VoiceOver (VoiceOver being free if you've bought an Apple device). Being free, those screen readers are quite popular. https://webaim.org/projects/screenreadersurvey7/#used https://webaim.org/projects/screenreadersurvey7/#used And mobile use of screen readers has massively grown just as mobile web traffic has grown. https://webaim.org/projects/screenreadersurvey7/#mobilescreenreaders https://webaim.org/projects/screenreadersurvey7/#mobilescree... There's a lot you can do without firing up a screen reader. Try to use your site without touching the mouse. Don't waste your time or someone else's if you can't complete tasks without the mouse even with your vision. Visual indication of focus is something you need anyway and not necessarily discovered by screen reader testing (though using a screen reader and screen zooming together is common).
reaperducer 9y ago
I'm not sure it's fair to call JAWS the "dominant" platform. It's one of two dominant platforms. A lot of people use multiple screen readers. JAWS 66.0% NVDA 64.9% VoiceOver 39.6% Source: https://webaim.org/projects/screenreadersurvey7/#used https://webaim.org/projects/screenreadersurvey7/#used

heartbreak 9y ago

> And it's a very expensive tool. The "pro" version, which is the only version approved for dev work is $1100 Which brings us to one of the author's other points: Not everyone is rich. There are many solo web developers who simply don't have the resources available to make their website accessible. Do we (in the U.S.) need an ADA for websites? We essentially applied it to government websites, but my personal blog doesn't have to be compliant. Regulation of that nature would have an immediate impact on solo and other small web developers, just like GDPR. Perhaps it's necessary, though, so that we aren't excluding wide swaths of people from having equal opportunities on the web. Edit: Note that certain interpretations (including court opinions) of ADA apply the public accommodation concept to business websites. I'm not aware of such an interpretation for personal websites as ADA would probably not apply.

bandrami 9y ago
I think laws and enforcement are the wrong way to look at it. A small business doesn't have to spend money developing tooling and a framework to, e.g., make asynchronous database calls and update page data without a refresh. The community developed that because the community cares about it. The community has shown significantly less caring about persons with disabilities being able to use websites. If the developer community had developed the accessibility version of AJAX we would use it just like we use AJAX.
logfromblammo 9y ago
> There are many solo web developers who simply don't have the resources available to make their website accessible. All HTML and JS documentation is available gratis, and every operating system is distributed with a text editor. <html> <head> <title>Accessible Web Page</title> </head> <body> <p>This is an accessible web page.</p> </body> </html> Perhaps you meant to specify rapid, tool-assisted development of a feature-rich website? Making an accessible website is simple as dirt. It will just look dated to people who don't need to rely on the accessibility features of their browser or OS. It may even "look" dated to people who use screen-readers.
- gnode 9y ago
  The plain HTML example is a bit of a straw-man. It's beyond "dated", being a faux pas for all but the most ascetic of users. My interpretation of "resources" here would be time / money. Making sure a site is accessible by everyone takes effort which is difficult to justify, particularly if you're already stretched to capacity.
  - logfromblammo 9y ago
    That's a way of saying that accessibility is a low priority. Everyone has a choice between finally making the site usable for a minority of potential users, or putting in a new feature. If you always choose the option that makes the most money, some people always get left out. The ADA was drafted to force physical businesses to make reasonable access a higher priority. Accessibility has the same time/money costs as any other feature. The same goes for internationalization and localization. Or for robust user data protection and security. The longer you wait to consider doing it, the more it's going to cost you.

mars4rp 9y ago

You can use NVDA, it is a free, OS and it does the job!

bandrami 9y ago

> but the tooling and dominant platforms just aren't as mature as they would need to be to consider it a required core skill Then incent a generation of 19 year olds to fix that, rather than build yet another JavaScript library dependency resolution tool. I think she is spot on: the tooling and libraries are weak because the developer community just doesn't care.

epicide 9y ago
Of course the community doesn't care. You can spend your time learning to make a better visually designed project or spend your time learning to make an accessible project. You can't do both (to the same degree and in the same amount of time) and one is way more likely to make a difference in your likelihood to get a job. I agree that the community should care but am not at all surprised that hardly anybody does. There's no incentive to do so. I'm not saying it's solely on businesses to make people care. They don't have the incentives, either. This is where regulations might've helped.
- wwweston 9y ago
  > There's no incentive to do so Well, the incentives to do so aren't obvious. Having worked on a bunch of (a) web applications with no dynamic client behavior to speak of (b) SPAs that are essentially a dynamic client talking to a service layer speaking JSON and/or XML (c) things in between... I think I've noticed a pattern, and it's that web applications where people take the time to think about how things would work with no dynamic client behavior, going through a process that more or less represents domain logic as HTTP operations on resources that can be represented as HTML (among other representations), these applications end up being more legible over time than projects with client engineering/experience as most of the focus. Not all applications fit this model, so there are limits to the approach. And accessibility is a somewhat different domain. But the concerns overlap, so one tl;dr might be this: Site accessibility is one canary in the web application mines. If it's dead, you might be accumulating technical debt.

Animats 9y ago

US web sites don't have to worry about "accessibility" any more. The Trump Administration moved enforcement in that area to the "inactive" category last year.[1] [1] https://www.adatitleiii.com/2017/07/doj-places-website-rulemaking-on-the-inactive-list/ https://www.adatitleiii.com/2017/07/doj-places-website-rulem...

talmand 9y ago
Anything one president changes can be changed back by the next president. I would follow the guidelines regardless.
extra88 9y ago
Hardly, most of the risk to organizations is from citizens lawsuits, not federal regulatory enforcement. There are more lawsuits than ever and as judgements and settlements have been almost entirely on the side of making sites more accessible, the risk of continuing to provide an inaccessible site increases.

simion314 9y ago

As a developer you can design with more empathy, here are a few tips that are not expensive and I and other people with disabilities or even healthy persons would appreciate: -allow the usage of the application without the mouse(if it is a painting app then maybe skip this), so don't break the navigation with Tab key, allow selecting buttons and activating them with the keyboard, if you have a search input allow me to press Enter to start and not to hit a search button with the mouse, try to allow the users customizing the key bindings(depends if your app needs key bindings) -don't use horrible colors for fonts, like light gray on white background, even if it feels readable on your screen other screens differ so better use some more contrast -if you make a mobile or desktop application use the user defined colors and font sizes, test your app with the larger font sizes and see how it looks.

sampleinajar 9y ago

> "Doing Accessibility work feels like doing CSS work back in the late 90s." Agreed. One of my first positions was doing accessibility on a government agency's app because no one else wanted to. It was a horrible, bloated legacy app with an antiquated UI framework that did not support most Accessibility features natively, so it was a lot of JQuery DOM manipulation (per my supervisor's suggestion) to rewrite CSS. I still have nightmares.

extra88 9y ago

There are very few problems that you could create that would effect JAWS users but not users of free screen readers like NVDA or VoiceOver (VoiceOver being free if you've bought an Apple device). Being free, those screen readers are quite popular. https://webaim.org/projects/screenreadersurvey7/#used https://webaim.org/projects/screenreadersurvey7/#used And mobile use of screen readers has massively grown just as mobile web traffic has grown. https://webaim.org/projects/screenreadersurvey7/#mobilescreenreaders https://webaim.org/projects/screenreadersurvey7/#mobilescree... There's a lot you can do without firing up a screen reader. Try to use your site without touching the mouse. Don't waste your time or someone else's if you can't complete tasks without the mouse even with your vision. Visual indication of focus is something you need anyway and not necessarily discovered by screen reader testing (though using a screen reader and screen zooming together is common).

reaperducer 9y ago

I'm not sure it's fair to call JAWS the "dominant" platform. It's one of two dominant platforms. A lot of people use multiple screen readers. JAWS 66.0% NVDA 64.9% VoiceOver 39.6% Source: https://webaim.org/projects/screenreadersurvey7/#used https://webaim.org/projects/screenreadersurvey7/#used