4 ms·

An article like this, comes up every few months. They tend to give an intro to the technical how-to but miss the step of convincing the readers that supporting

An article like this, comes up every few months. They tend to give an intro to the technical how-to but miss the step of convincing the readers that supporting screen readers is desirable. Ok sure, it'd be _nice_ if blind people could navigate my website. But... how nice? How many screenreaders can I reasonably expect as a % of traffic? What difference will it make to their quality of life? What decision process should I use to decide if _my_ website needs to support this? Does my personal blog to support a screen reader? What about this bank login page? This motivating information is a cruicual step in actually getting people to care enough to do something different. A contrasting example is the discourse on "bloated" webpages being slow and hard to use on shitty old phones. The upshot is that if your website needs to download and run 1MB of JavaScript then someone viewing it on a 5 year old low cost smartphone on a crappy 3G is going to have a bad time. The statistics around how many people have bad internet motivated me to try and reduce download sizes. It would also be nice to have a guide on convincing your boss to give you time to support accessibility. The technical details are good (and this article is quite readable) but probably aren't the key bottleneck in more people writing accessible markup. <edited for less unnecessary snark>

madeofpalk 5y ago
Yes badgering developers to do such onerous things like… use a <button> element for buttons. Rather than ask "why should I support screen readers" maybe ask "why would I actively break them and make my website unusable?"
- The_Amp_Walrus 5y ago
  Writing HTML/CSS is one of the hardest and most frustrating things I've done as a programmer. It sucks. I would actively break my website to get the job done without losing my mind. I would need to be very _motivated_ to change my behaviour. I amended my comment to be less snarky I was coming on a bit to strong.
  - madeofpalk 5y ago
    "Just" learn the tools you're using.
jackfruitpeel 5y ago
One of the fallacies around accessibility is 'just for blind people' — there are all sorts of physical and mental disabilities humans suffer from, at various levels of severity (sometimes temporarily, sometimes permanently). It's not just screenreaders—assistive technologies range from grandpa zooming into 8X screensize, to a paraplegic teen using a mix of keyboard nav and trackball. Accessible design and development improves the lives of more people than you'd expect — and it goes a long way toward guaranteeing better usability for everyone. Gov.uk is a great example to this. Anyway, if you're working on something with any type of scale, you should be hitting a11y standards as a matter of professional standards. Activist lawsuits in the US are doubling/tripling year over year, and you can expect EU legislation pretty soon too. If you're just dicking around on a website with minimal traffic, it a matter of personal conscience and intended audience.

madeofpalk 5y ago

Yes badgering developers to do such onerous things like… use a <button> element for buttons. Rather than ask "why should I support screen readers" maybe ask "why would I actively break them and make my website unusable?"

The_Amp_Walrus 5y ago
Writing HTML/CSS is one of the hardest and most frustrating things I've done as a programmer. It sucks. I would actively break my website to get the job done without losing my mind. I would need to be very _motivated_ to change my behaviour. I amended my comment to be less snarky I was coming on a bit to strong.
- madeofpalk 5y ago
  "Just" learn the tools you're using.

jackfruitpeel 5y ago

One of the fallacies around accessibility is 'just for blind people' — there are all sorts of physical and mental disabilities humans suffer from, at various levels of severity (sometimes temporarily, sometimes permanently). It's not just screenreaders—assistive technologies range from grandpa zooming into 8X screensize, to a paraplegic teen using a mix of keyboard nav and trackball. Accessible design and development improves the lives of more people than you'd expect — and it goes a long way toward guaranteeing better usability for everyone. Gov.uk is a great example to this. Anyway, if you're working on something with any type of scale, you should be hitting a11y standards as a matter of professional standards. Activist lawsuits in the US are doubling/tripling year over year, and you can expect EU legislation pretty soon too. If you're just dicking around on a website with minimal traffic, it a matter of personal conscience and intended audience.