Dos and don'ts on designing for accessibility (2016) | Hacker News Reader

Dos and don'ts on designing for accessibility (2016)

accessibility.blog.gov.uk

110 pointsfanf210 comments

Most of these are just good principles for making a site better for everyone, so it's good how much overlap there is. The screenreader requirements are probably the only things that imposes some actual constraints

This is the brilliant fact underlying nearly all accessibility work: in addition to the people with documented permanent disabilities that are the official beneficiaries of such developments (and regulations where those exist), there are hosts of people who are temporarily disabled, who are disabled but undiagnosed, who are not quite over the margin of "disabled" but who are less able than others, who have temporary needs that aren't disabilities at all but just benefit from different routes to access, or even who just plain have different preferences. The ADA in the US is a great example of this—a lot of the stuff it mandates makes your life better even if you're just, say, pushing a stroller and don't "need" the ADA-mandated ramp.

So yeah, best practices for disability accommodation are not just about handling the "<1%" (as someone in a different thread put it) that need them.

The argument "it's good for SEO!" sometimes helps convince colleagues/customers who are otherwise unconvinced. Well, whatever floats your boat..

I'm aware of most techniques for making websites more accessible, and try to apply them where possible.

Unfortunately, the problem is most often not in applying the techniques, but convincing non-technical colleagues that these steps are important, even if they take a little longer.

The easiest way to good accessibility is to do it rather than trying to persuade people that theoretically can say no. It’s part of being a good designer and/or developer; to do otherwise is the undersell your skills and let down your employer / the client.

You can mention the liability potential from the ADA.

I've started to notice that customers are getting uneasy at the prospect of incoming legislation here in The Netherlands. I believe there's a new law in the works that makes accessibility mandatory in some cases, mostly pseudo-government related content though, so its scope remains limited.

In my experience with gov.uk websites, they really do dogfood on these principles. It's a great reference for good design.

GDS is doing an exemplary job on gov.uk websites. There are actual user groups with accessibility challenges that will evaluate web services in the UX labs before release.

Service designers, UX people and developers will take this user group into account at all stages of design, or else GDS won't let them GA the service.

Contrast it with the unicorn/more money than you can spend .com tech companies that view accessibility as a "necessity we wish would get away with" or small startups that view it as "why are you wasting your time with <1% of our users" and you see the challenges and design decisions being drastically different between different entities... :(

Bear in mind, accessibility concerns a huge array of people one way or another, from straight out being blind/deaf to dyschromatopsia and related issues, people unable to use a mouse etc... It's not an easy problem to tackle and it is a problem that I wish everyone developing for mobile/web would take into account every day...:/

By a large margin gov.uk with the redesign became the best website on the Internet. Whenever I needed something I could find it easy and fast. Nice to look at as well. It shows that you don't need crap(stock photos anyone?) to make a nice website.

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