4 ms·

>> Unfortunately there is a segment of the population that is completely incapable of filling in a form. I work in accessibility. Most of the forms I've worke

>> Unfortunately there is a segment of the population that is completely incapable of filling in a form. I work in accessibility. Most of the forms I've worked with are horrendously bad for accessibility. Chat bots are even worse. People with vision or cognitive issues are an afterthought these days. As we've forced more and more people to use these poorly coded or poorly designed applications and moved away from allowing people to talk to an actual person, we are creating an internet that is increasingly less accessible to people who really need it. The sad thing is way too many devs I work with have no idea how to write semantic HTML any more. Just simple things like putting things in an unordered list seems beyond some of the frameworks and CMS they use.

sublinear 2y ago
Stop blaming developers and start blaming your organization for not taking accessibility seriously enough. It takes a ton of review, SQA, and dev time to get this stuff right. Writing semantic HTML is just the tip of the iceberg. Nobody is an expert on it either no matter how well they've read WCAG and how much experience they have implementing it. It's a moving target and every page or app is different especially when there are any design or functionality changes. It's a team effort. You can't just dump all responsibility on devs.
noodlesUK 2y ago
I agree. I think that a website using (styled) normal semantic HTML forms would be wayyy better for accessibility than some chatbot service which is likely doing some weird things to the markup as a response to stuff coming in on web sockets etc. I think Gov.UK is a great example of how those forms should look most of the time. I would be a strong advocate for some regulatory framework requiring an effective right to access human support for businesses exceeding a certain size.

sublinear 2y ago

Stop blaming developers and start blaming your organization for not taking accessibility seriously enough. It takes a ton of review, SQA, and dev time to get this stuff right. Writing semantic HTML is just the tip of the iceberg. Nobody is an expert on it either no matter how well they've read WCAG and how much experience they have implementing it. It's a moving target and every page or app is different especially when there are any design or functionality changes. It's a team effort. You can't just dump all responsibility on devs.

noodlesUK 2y ago

I agree. I think that a website using (styled) normal semantic HTML forms would be wayyy better for accessibility than some chatbot service which is likely doing some weird things to the markup as a response to stuff coming in on web sockets etc. I think Gov.UK is a great example of how those forms should look most of the time. I would be a strong advocate for some regulatory framework requiring an effective right to access human support for businesses exceeding a certain size.