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Nice practical article. Accessibility is really important, but one of my pet peeves is when people call developers lazy for not making apps accessible by defaul

Nice practical article. Accessibility is really important, but one of my pet peeves is when people call developers lazy for not making apps accessible by default. There really is a lot of concepts to learn, conflicting priorities, and tools to get familiar with, on top of making the business case to do it. Most developers and designers I've worked aren't that familiar with WCAG rules either. By the way, the blue on yellow, and blue on green buttons won't pass color contrast requirements. Black on yellow will work, and white on blue (for darker blues) will work. Finding a set of branded colors that contrast as needed is tricky too.

jakey_bakey 3y ago
Thank you for the comment :) Appreciate the feedback, tbh I was a little lazy and probably should have confirmed the 'improved' colour scheme actually worked
mcguire 3y ago
Most developers and designers are unfamiliar with a major portion of their jobs. That says quite a bit about professionalism in the software development field.
- Zanfa 3y ago
  > Most developers and designers are unfamiliar with a major portion of their jobs. Using spans with event listeners instead of anchor tags is my biggest pet peeve of incompetent frontend engineers. It’s like they go out of their way to take something that they get for free and then spend time and effort to break it.
  - acdha 3y ago
    One of the really frustrating parts of that is that they’ll blame accessibility for the extra work rather than admitting that they signed up to duplicate built-in functionality and blew it. I had that recently with some form validation where it went through this “wow that was a lot of work!” cycle and it was like “an HTML 101 form would have taken 15 minutes”.
acdha 3y ago
I agree that there are a lot of other things to learn but accessibility is a legal and moral imperative, not just a nice to have feature. I think “lazy” might not be the right word since many developers don’t even know that they’re cutting corners, so perhaps it’s better to use “negligence” and realize that our field culturally encourages it rather than just blaming individuals.
- infotainment 3y ago
  In the end, software accessibility represents an edge case affecting a tiny fraction of users. You can argue it’s morally wrong to not support that edge case, but I do understand why it wouldn’t be a priority for most without legal prodding.
  - acdha 3y ago
    It’s more than a tiny fraction, but yes, that’s why the laws are so important: the cost of not having them is high to specific people, and businesses may not see that directly because someone who finds your product hard to use is likely to just stop without telling you so it’s hard to tell how many affected people there actually are. Having a simple legal requirement short circuits all of those discussions.
  - squigz 3y ago
    > In the end, software accessibility represents an edge case affecting a tiny fraction of users. I'm curious: What fraction do you think it is? And what fraction do you think it should be for it to be taken more seriously?
    - infotainment 3y ago
      To get into exact numbers, it starts to depend on what exactly is meant by "accessibility". For simplicity's sake, let's take supporting screen reading software. What % of the population uses a screenreader? If we assume that every blind user uses one, then the slice is about 2.4%. According to CanIUse, that's a similar percentage to the share of users who use browsers that don't support Flexbox. Have you used Flexbox recently? If so, you've excluded a similar slice of your potential user base. And, just like with ignoring flexbox, you can of course code around this. I've actually written SPAs with screen reader support, and it's a pain. Advocates will tell you that if you just follow the WAI-ARIA standard, it'll work seamlessly! But no -- in practice, each screen reader is like a mini-IE6; they all deviate from the standards in strange and unpredictable ways.

jakey_bakey 3y ago

Thank you for the comment :) Appreciate the feedback, tbh I was a little lazy and probably should have confirmed the 'improved' colour scheme actually worked

mcguire 3y ago

Most developers and designers are unfamiliar with a major portion of their jobs. That says quite a bit about professionalism in the software development field.

Zanfa 3y ago
> Most developers and designers are unfamiliar with a major portion of their jobs. Using spans with event listeners instead of anchor tags is my biggest pet peeve of incompetent frontend engineers. It’s like they go out of their way to take something that they get for free and then spend time and effort to break it.
- acdha 3y ago
  One of the really frustrating parts of that is that they’ll blame accessibility for the extra work rather than admitting that they signed up to duplicate built-in functionality and blew it. I had that recently with some form validation where it went through this “wow that was a lot of work!” cycle and it was like “an HTML 101 form would have taken 15 minutes”.

acdha 3y ago

I agree that there are a lot of other things to learn but accessibility is a legal and moral imperative, not just a nice to have feature. I think “lazy” might not be the right word since many developers don’t even know that they’re cutting corners, so perhaps it’s better to use “negligence” and realize that our field culturally encourages it rather than just blaming individuals.

infotainment 3y ago
In the end, software accessibility represents an edge case affecting a tiny fraction of users. You can argue it’s morally wrong to not support that edge case, but I do understand why it wouldn’t be a priority for most without legal prodding.
- acdha 3y ago
  It’s more than a tiny fraction, but yes, that’s why the laws are so important: the cost of not having them is high to specific people, and businesses may not see that directly because someone who finds your product hard to use is likely to just stop without telling you so it’s hard to tell how many affected people there actually are. Having a simple legal requirement short circuits all of those discussions.
- squigz 3y ago
  > In the end, software accessibility represents an edge case affecting a tiny fraction of users. I'm curious: What fraction do you think it is? And what fraction do you think it should be for it to be taken more seriously?
  - infotainment 3y ago
    To get into exact numbers, it starts to depend on what exactly is meant by "accessibility". For simplicity's sake, let's take supporting screen reading software. What % of the population uses a screenreader? If we assume that every blind user uses one, then the slice is about 2.4%. According to CanIUse, that's a similar percentage to the share of users who use browsers that don't support Flexbox. Have you used Flexbox recently? If so, you've excluded a similar slice of your potential user base. And, just like with ignoring flexbox, you can of course code around this. I've actually written SPAs with screen reader support, and it's a pain. Advocates will tell you that if you just follow the WAI-ARIA standard, it'll work seamlessly! But no -- in practice, each screen reader is like a mini-IE6; they all deviate from the standards in strange and unpredictable ways.