Ask HN: Is accessibility worth it? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Is accessibility worth it?

8 pointssharps_xp18 comments

ive been reading a lot about progressive enhancement, aria, browser feature support, and as an aspiring bootstrapper, it seems like a ton of work.

can someone present an argument that making a website accessible for a wider audience FIRST makes good business sense?

or alternatively, can anyone vouch for any tooling to make accessibility easier?

also, related, i have a friend who runs an e-commerce business and there are litigious entities suing them because their site is not accessible. they, under a different name, also provide services to update the site so that it is accessible.

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If we are being absolutely honest, no, making your MVP comply with all of the accessibility guidelines before going live is not worth the effort. Given that most sites/projects/startups end up shutting down early-on, the odds that your project will end up being used by anyone with significant impairments is very low from the start. I believe medium to large size businesses should absolutely accommodate for accessibility, but the burden is really high and the benefit is really low for smaller services.

All this being said, the cottage industry of lawyers going around suing people for ADA violations is significant and something to be aware of. What I would suggest is that you do the bare minimum of accessibility accommodation, based on your jurisdiction, and only look into adding more accommodations as you grow and scale.

Edit: It makes sense to give alt text for images, use good contrast, and to follow best practices for UI/UX. See what the major complaint(s) are against your friend and try to avoid that for the time being. In essence, don't feel compelled to pay a consultant thousands of dollars for an amount of accessibility that is overkill at this stage.

Lastly, what I wrote sounded harsh, and I really do wish you the best. I would hate to have you spend thousands on premature accessibility and potentially lose the ability to fund something else that might help your project. Best of luck.

It helps to reframe your thoughts on accessibility as a subset of user experience (UX). Putting aside any potential moral argument, how important is UX to your business/project?

When accessibility is thought about and incorporated ahead of time, your overall user experience tends to be better. This is sometimes referred to as Universal Design.

I managed a project where we implemented a UI redesign for our existing enterprise SaaS software and we "went the extra mile" to not just make the experience accessible but to make that experience pleasant for our users with disabilities. In the end, some of the features -- especially around keyboard navigation -- that came out of that accessibility work were considered the best part of the redesign to our users.

Love this comment and the connection between UX and universal design. From a reductionist standpoint theres little value, from an expansive standpoint accessibility is literally how you make your product accessible to more customers

I've worked in education previously. Apart from being mandated by the gov't, lots of kids have issues so making allowances for them makes sense.

We had to retrofit some of the WCAG functionality into our product. Possible but better to have it as a requirement up front. The thing is, modern browsers are really good about accessibility so you gotta go out of your way to mess it up.

In my opinion it's like having ramps for wheelchairs. Not the first thing that needs to go up, but it should be soon. If you don't design your building with the ramp in mind you usually end up with an ugly design.

I also work in education and agree. I have also had direct calls with the Feds who enforce accessibility, and their stance is evolving. The future trend is not going to be just "can it be used?", but "is the experience as smooth as it is for fully abled users?"

As an example, if you make mouse-based users do something in 2 clicks, but keyboard-based users tab through 100 elements to do the same thing, that is going to be flagged as not accessible even if it does pass WCAG validators.

As far as startup MVPs go, I agree completely that it isn't required on day one, but the design should take it into consideration to be ready for the future.

thanks for that insight. that kind of throws drag and drop interfaces out the window

We made drag-and-drop interfaces accessible by allowing users to TAB through the original list, press ENTER on the item they want to move, then use the arrow keys to move the item and press ENTER again when done (or ESC to cancel). After each move, the item's current position, and any necessary local context, was announced via `aria-live` region.

There are other ways that this can be accomplished with even fewer keystrokes, so I can't imagine a scenario where drag-and-drop interfaces would have to be avoided because they couldn't be made meaningfully accessible.

do you have a demo or a gif or this? would love to see it

I can't share the work I referred to above, but it was very similar to the last example on this page: https://salesforce-ux.github.io/dnd-a11y-patterns

Disclaimer: I have no affiliation with Salesforce or the creation of that example page. I just found it in a web search.

HTML is accessible by default. Screen readers or similar tools are good at making sense of HTML that provides fallbacks (such as alt attributes) and doesn't stray too far from the standard.

As for tools, for example, there is https://tenon.io/ by accessibility expert Karl Groves.

I think accessibility is critical for websites, but whether or not it makes business sense depends on the organization and its audience.

I've worked for municipal government in the US and federal in Canada. In the US, following Section 508 and the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.0) was a requirement for all our projects. As a team, we also committed to writing at a Grade 5 or less reading level, as for many constituents of the city, English may not be their first language, and government services should be accessible to everyone. Having a website that people could use, interact with, complete tasks on, etc, meant that they were fewer phone calls, emails, and support requests for things like translation support, checking where the snowplows were, or renewing a dog license.

If you have a broad audience and a global audience, having an accessible website makes it possible for everyone to get the information or have the interaction you're looking for. In my experience sometimes that can be mean losing out on cutting-edge or super interactive features, but you get to ensure a baseline pleasant experience for everyone.

In the United States, the common interpretation of Section 508 requires that vendors and vendors of vendors of federal government contractors adhere to WCAG 2.0. Building it from the start prevents you from having to redesign parts of your work and churn your users when you choose to pursue this market.

A minority of your users may have permanent disabilities but many have many have temporary or situational (looking at their phone in a bright coffee shop, forgot their glasses) disabilities, and building to common a11y standards allows you to use off-the-shelf tools (e.g. axe) to easily and semi-automatically help maintain that you can deliver a good experience in these circumstances.

Some surveys I've been aware of find a surprising amount (1/3 to 1/2) of users use screen magnifiers. This isn't common among developers who have 30" IPS monitors and good or well-corrected vision, but it is more common in the general population. Anecdotally, many people have awful displays too.

My experience is that a11y is often not a priority and then one day it is suddenly the highest priority. It is not fun to have to drop everything you are doing and retrofit and/or redesign to avoid a lawsuit or losing a big contract.

The easiest thing you can do is run a linter with an a11y plugin to make sure you cover the basics. It can be annoying at first, but you'll get used to it.

A tool like axe (https://github.com/dequelabs/axe-core) is good for checking your work and/or automating away some of the less obvious stuff. It provides both a Chrome plugin and an automated checker for CI.

Getting comfortable enough with this stuff that it no longer requires a ton of work is definitely a good goal. Your users will have a better time overall and you'll have peace of mind.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/001872081664096...

> A high level of Web accessibility led to better performance (i.e., task completion time and task completion rate) than low or very low accessibility. Likewise, high Web accessibility improved user ratings (i.e., perceived usability, aesthetics, workload, and trustworthiness) compared to low or very low Web accessibility. There was no difference between the very low and low Web accessibility conditions for any of the outcome measures.

> can someone present an argument that making a website accessible for a wider audience FIRST makes good business sense?

In more than 80% of cases accessibility is free if you know what you are doing. The best business case there is a competence filter on hiring front end developers.

I'm not sure I'm correctly understanding your last paragraph. Are you saying that an entity is suing your friend, and an affiliate of that entity is offering them remediation services?

yes, either that or there’s a partnership where one presents a problem and the other sells a solution

I suppose it would be wise to find out what your local laws say. Whether not doing any of this right at the start could get you in trouble.

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