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Comment by tra3 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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