Ask HN: Are web developers still overlooking accessibility | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Are web developers still overlooking accessibility

4 pointsnickmyersdt7 comments

Context: I'm responsible for a web development team, and have been hiring again recently.

When interviewing junior (0-2 years experience) or mid (2-5 years experience) developers, I've been surprised about how little accessibility is understood or prioritised.

Despite being taught in education, bootcamps and training; despite laws, penalties and improved resources.

My own background has had it drummed into me that accessibility is a primary requirement and a professional obligation, however after speaking to dozens of "front end" and "full stack" candidates it appears it's not even on developers radars any more.

I wondered what the HN community thought of whether this is globally true, or I've just been talking to people who are not representative of the norm in the profession.

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As someone who has been part of the a11y community for a while now, the short answer is: yes, in general, both the awareness and the technical knowledge are quite bad among developers. Other hiring tech leads share this opinion, e.g. [1]

[1] https://twitter.com/KittyGiraudel/status/1414556623176179715

Accessibility is not a technical issue so there is no reason to expect developers to focus on it. A triple A website is not fundamentally harder to build than a single A one, or one where it doesn't matter. The difficulties of accessibility are elsewhere: content strategy, UX, design, project management, conflicting priorities, etc. and are exponentially harder as you add As to your target.

> Accessibility is not a technical issue so there is no reason to expect developers to focus on it.

I have to disagree with this part. All the points you've mentioned are required to maintain a general accessibility awareness within a project. But getting accessibility right is still mostly a technical topic: using buttons vs. links, using semantic HTML, implementing ARIA roles correctly for non-native components, having at least a high-level WCAG knowledge, being able to operate a screen reader, etc.

Everything you mentioned a) can be learned on the spot, and b) has been a solved problem for at least a decade. Accessibility offers no technical challenge whatsoever and, _if correctly prioritised_, can be handled by _any_ developer at _any_ seniority level.

You should stop expecting every junior to have the same domain knowledge you developed over a decade or two. The challenges are elsewhere.

Your experience does not match mine and many of other accessibility specialists. So we have to agree to disagree.

I absolutely agree. Whilst other roles play a part in accessibility the lion's share of responsibility absolutely sits with the front end developer.

I'd argue middle managers don't care about accessibility because it's a minority that won't give a big boost towards their KPIs, thus developers generally don't tend to get the opportunity to explore this at their dayjobs.

They have to put in effort outside work hours to learn.

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