A blind coder who makes Facebook accessible [video]

Prior to my current role I worked at a very large public university. Accessibility was always a "requirement" for our projects but as 1% of our audience it was less tested and less focused during development cycles. This was frustrating to me as it always felt like we were leaving an audience out of the equation but usually these discussions were treated no different than debates on which versions of IE we would support.

My last year at the university accessibility became a up front and center focus. This was a strange shift from my prior few years but it was told to me that there is a group of attorneys that are targeting public institutions who lack accessibility and suing them for discrimination. It was presented similarly to the way patent trolls operate. Find a large target (public university or government entity) and sue them into a settlement.

Internally I was conflicting because on one hand this was forcing us to finally support an audience that deserves to be supporting and treated equally. On the other hand taking advantage of this situation and scooping up legal fees in the process was not something I felt was proper.

Anyway, my point here is it is great to see companies like Facebook support this. More specifically by having part of your target audience on the dev team you end up actually being accessible and not just following the standards.

Here is another example of improving accessibility, this time by Microsoft:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=R2mC-NUAmMk