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The dismal accessibility adoption on the web is horrendous, but working for a company that has to deliver accessible web apps to comply with Federal law has rea

The dismal accessibility adoption on the web is horrendous, but working for a company that has to deliver accessible web apps to comply with Federal law has really opened my eyes to how terrible to ecosystem of accessibility is. My team spends about a quarter of our time working strictly on accessibility, and we find ourselves straying from the beaten path often in order to accommodate a specific screenreader/OS combo. We run into situations all the time where we're unable to get insight from the docs because something is buried deep in the spec. We also have to draw a line in the sand about which screenreaders to support and which ones to pass on, which pisses off clients that use screenreaders that we don't support. Automated accessibility audit results sometimes contradict documentation around best practices, which can be frustrating. The other thing I've learned is that developers usually hate working on accessibility issues because the screenreaders are much less intuitive to use and can really muck up your workflow if you're trying to ensure that an interface is completely accessible. While I agree that we as a community can do better, I think that web accessibility in its current form is largely a failure because people see it as a cost that they're not interested in incurring, possibly because of the issues I've listed above.

ssivark 7y ago
Since website frameworks like Bootstrap are a thing, would it make sense to implement accessibility guidelines at that level, so that designers/people who don't know are encouraged to use sane defaults? Or is it too content/layout specific? Eg: I might like to roll my own static blog, but I don't know how to ensure that it is accessible.
- namibj 7y ago
  Stick to HTML for most. If it has a sane layout when you disable JS, CSS and images, you should be fine.
- save_ferris 7y ago
  I think making frameworks like bootstrap accessible-by-default is a great idea, but it won't be catch-all solution. A11y needs to be a conscious part of the design/development process, just like security. One of the things we've learned is that much of the complex, dynamic UI things one can do with frameworks like React/Angular is really, really, really hard and frustrating to make fully accessible because people never design React components that are easy to use with a keyboard. We live in this world where the capabilities of UIs for enabled people continue to grow at the cost of accessibility for the disabled. With the shift towards frontend frameworks, the problem needs to be addressed at the markup level IMO.

ssivark 7y ago

Since website frameworks like Bootstrap are a thing, would it make sense to implement accessibility guidelines at that level, so that designers/people who don't know are encouraged to use sane defaults? Or is it too content/layout specific? Eg: I might like to roll my own static blog, but I don't know how to ensure that it is accessible.

namibj 7y ago
Stick to HTML for most. If it has a sane layout when you disable JS, CSS and images, you should be fine.
save_ferris 7y ago
I think making frameworks like bootstrap accessible-by-default is a great idea, but it won't be catch-all solution. A11y needs to be a conscious part of the design/development process, just like security. One of the things we've learned is that much of the complex, dynamic UI things one can do with frameworks like React/Angular is really, really, really hard and frustrating to make fully accessible because people never design React components that are easy to use with a keyboard. We live in this world where the capabilities of UIs for enabled people continue to grow at the cost of accessibility for the disabled. With the shift towards frontend frameworks, the problem needs to be addressed at the markup level IMO.