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Comment by jaywalk | Hacker News Reader

I completely understand why accessible websites are important and fully support the cause. But I cannot stand doing the work!

I do some work for a Very Large Corporation that was sued over accessibility issues with their website and settled for a large sum of money, so their legal department is on high alert for this. They have a dedicated accessibility testing team, and I will often get a suggestion on how to fix an issue, fix it, and then someone else will test my fix and give me a totally different suggestion on how to fix it. It's infuriating.

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> I will often get a suggestion on how to fix an issue, fix it, and then someone else will test my fix and give me a totally different suggestion on how to fix it. It's infuriating.

Polite indication that this is a problem with your organisation, not accessibility or accessibility work. The same issues can occur with design and other areas where everybody and their grandmother has an opinion; it's up to a good org to manage all of those opinions and expertise in an appropriate fashion. If they aren't, and this is making it harder for you to create accessible experiences, you should raise it with someone.

I dunno. I agree this work is important, but I also find it boring and frustrating. Its like adding logging, plumbing configs, etc. Obviously it has to happen, but at least for me it's neither interesting nor exciting.

Sounds like you should look for a new job that has more of what you like to do. However so much of reliable software product development is confligs, logging, documentation, unit tests...

That's called being a professional. Engineers create useful and rigorous systems. What other professions get to complain about having to do the "unfun" parts? The world runs on software. I'm unhappy with the idea that the software running the world is just built according to what some people find fun.

Actual engineering professionals spend their time making sure systems are safe and reliable. Website "engineering" "professionals" spend their time doing anti-utilitarian make-work to fend off lawsuit trolls instead of making systems that are safe and reliable.

> anti-utilitarian make-work to fend off lawsuit trolls

Making sure that people aren't blocked from completing a task due to a situation beyond their control, such as a physical disability, seems pretty important to me. It's true that some organizations only implement accessibility for the sake of preventing lawsuits, but there's a legitimate reason to have that legislation in the first place.

Accessibility isn't something to patch, it is the foundation of the open web, shaken by the massive influence of div soup frameworks.

That's a ridiculous statement. Of course it's something to patch.

I wonder if GP Meant something like this. Pure HTML pages without Javascript hijacking the UI elements actually appear to be highly accessible. Or am I wrong about this?

> Pure HTML pages without Javascript hijacking the UI elements actually appear to be highly accessible

Nope. Dialog, progress, details, many input types, etc html tags are not very accessible by default and behave differently in browsers.

From the top of my head, you cannot get a proper date picker in safari using html alone.

You also need to change attributes to help navigate the user.

Mind you, accessibility goes beyond screen readers. You will need javascript for building gesture controls, keyboard shortcuts, etc which is very needed for people with restricted movements.

Many people will need UX feedback to understand what is going on. You cannot achieve that without Javascript. Animations, focus, etc are all part of usability and comes under accessibility.

Thanks, was not aware of these issues

HTML is not accessible by default, so this should not be confused with a simplistic "SPAs/JS are bad!" argument. In fact, many JS component libraries make it easier to comply with a11y since they can encapsulate and consistently share a11y needs like aria attributes, etc.

If pure semantic HTML isn't accessible then that is the fault of the browser/screenreader, and that's where the burden should lie.

Do a whole fix in one place for the benefit of everyone, rather than making every tiny website make a bunch of half fixes.

That's a nice principle, but legally the burden is on the website owner. We have to live within the reality that browsers do not provide, out of the box, accessible html components in some cases.

I also think you misread him.

He said something like: accessibility cannot be simply duct-taped on. It's a fundamental part of the core web technologies, that all the JS frameworks have obsfucated.

Having worked some in 508 compliance space -- if you treat it like a patch, you'll get a lot of different testers suggesting to try different things to fix it to bring it up to standards. I.e. the situation you are in.

You cannot patch some of the accessibility issues.

You will need to design your layout and order elements properly. You cannot patch it with aria- soup which many developers do.

I don't think there is a coherent historical or technical basis to claim that accessibility (as the term is being used in this thread) is "the foundation of the open web".

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