Why don't we developers care about accessibility?
In a prevoius project I became aware of the lack of respect in web development for people with disabilities.
I had the experience to come in contact with users that had reduced visual perception. It was an eye opener in many ways, especially as former sinner.
We needed to adopt our product to meet requirements for visually impaired users and it was a huge undertaking on an old product. Even if we fixed all bad markup, the bigger problem was workflow and page composition.
Too many pages had too much information to usable for user with a screen reader. If the screen reader reports 200 links on page, which one to open if all of them do totally different things? Just "reading" all of them takes a very long time and if the context of the link is always changing to different logical tasks.
And often the workflow to get to the correct context involved popups, mouse hovering, drag and drop and other bad design choices. Even for a normal user.
Usually the argument against making pages accessible is as follows,
* adds extra effort
* complicated
* hard to know correct solution
* screws up the design
I would argue that if you think this thru from the beginning and takes into account when doing the design, your general workflow will improve for all users, because you avoid the complicated solutions.
The irony is that myself is visually impaired with mild colorblindness, but I really never thought about it before that project.
Here at HN the login name in the upper right corner is written in green on an orange background. I can't read that. Its just a blur and cause eye irritation.
In my opinion, accessibility should be part of the curriculum in computes science courses.
But even if you do, you need to get developers to enjoy solving this problem. Most developers don't care when you mention it. Maybe because they don't see it as a technical problem.
What do you think?
Making accessibility a priority takes a lot of extra effort and time and often seems unimportant, especially if your target audience is more specific and doesn't focus on the sick or elderly specifically. It should pay off however as it normally forces you to stick to best practices in coding and design, and to keep the end user in mind, and make the product better for everyone. Ideally it should be one of the fundamentals your product is built on, not an afterthought once you start getting support mails about it - however perhaps that just doesn't work in a startup environment where you need to get out a MVP and iterate fast. Outside of that, I think a change in culture is needed to make accessibility a core component of product management.
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For developers to spend time on it, clients and customers must be educated about it and want to pay more for it. When that happens, I think we will see more tools develop to save time on the extra work.
This should be a blog post because the content is editorial.
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Because IE is taking all my stupid time !