For blind internet users, the fix can be worse than the flaws

https://web.archive.org/web/20220717011807/https://www.nytim...

When I worked at the university, doing their websites, I simply could not get accessibility on anyone's radar: my boss, the people in the power structure nearby, the awful design people who saw the Web as a means to deliver photography and, if forced, text in a brochure format.

I had my own tools -- making sure the XHTML and CSS were valid, testing on multiple browsers, testing on lynx, a separate PC with jankety mouse settings to make it hard to click and a few sets of glasses to distort my vision, etc. Accessibility has to be a first class citizen when you make that template, it cannot be bolted on later. And it means being rigorous: fill out that alt text, test that tab order. I had no budget, just raw stubbornness and a willingness to be the bad guy.

It was continually infuriating that nobody cared about people with low vision, or crap bandwidth, or colorblindness, or motor tremor, because, barring an early death or really great health, we're all liable to enter one or more of these groups with time.

The last, sad argument I had, which worked and was shameful, is that good accessibility almost automatically makes your SEO better. It is both true and mildly upsetting to have to resort to, I felt like I was saying "... also, orphans are more gamey than other kinds of meat."

I don't think you can Javascript your way out of these very real problems. What is needed is an Accessibility Czar for your web properties, who can veto anything, who can pull off their shoe and pound it off the table and force someone on the Design Team to wear a little duncecap as they read out an article on Target getting mauled by the ADA for their screwups.

Specifically, I personally can just write content straight to a database with my DB client. I can write nice, valid HTML. I can crop photos and output them just fine with various CLI and GUI applications.

The people I work with cannot.

So I write bits of code so that they can edit headlines and page titles without having to open a plain text editor. I create extensions so that the graphic element they want to include is done in a way that doesn't break the page markup. I write code so they can use the mouse to drag photos to where they need to place them in the articles they want to publish.

And people have accommodated my own needs: I really don't understand how my SSH keys work, just that they do work. I don't know how to write an SQL client, but someone wrote one I can use. Etc, etc.

The idea that as folks who are making things, a large portion of what we do is enabling people to do things they couldn't otherwise do makes me feel a great deal of solidarity with everyone who currently needs more accommodations than I do.

Pragmatically, if we live long enough we will all eventually have a hard time seeing the screen, clicking with a mouse, understanding new UI modalities, etc.

I find that fact quite motivating it means I am not just trying to be kind to other folks: working to make a11y a must-have is an action in solidarity with our own interests and not just a thing we might do for other people.

*People with disabilities hate overlays yet an overlay company is suing its critic, now snubbed from the internet (article scrubbed from his site). https://karlgroves.com/people-with-disabilities-hate-overlay...

I'd say the lack of accessibility is not really due to indifference, much more likely it is plain ignorance. Most people know close to nothing about accessibility, worse, don't even know that they need to know.

There's also a technical perspective. Web tech in general is very low level primitives that you stitch together, not really a coherent higher order UI stack. This means that for any given goal, there's a million ways to do it. There's a stunning lack of UI elements but even simple elements that do exist do not truly enforce accessibility.

For example, there's no such thing as a tab component, so people build their own. It's relatively difficult to make it fully accessible. And that assumes you'd even know about accessibility.

Take a simpler element, the img element. I might not know that there is such a thing as an "alt" tag. I'm supposed to know but nothing enforces this knowledge, there's no standard education in web dev. Even if I do know about the alt tag, I might ignore it, as excuse I'll use "other priorities". Or I do use it, but incorrectly, which happens more often than not.

My point is that all of this is almost entirely dependent on personal knowledge and discipline, which is a recipe for disaster at web scale. We need better foundations.

That said, there's reasons to be hopeful. It's definitely getting more attention nowadays and the tooling ecosystem is rapidly improving.

Instead, start with a UI library that already applies accessibility best practices, such as Material UI [0], then follow the guidance provided for each component (a library can't do everything for you, despite what many claim), as well as applying accessibility best practices to the site as a whole. Only then apply automated review, and manual review by accessibility experts, fixing issues raised at each stage.

Disclosure – I contribute to Material UI.

[0] https://mui.com/material-ui/react-text-field/#accessibility

Well, that’s probably just as much up in the air.