[HN Gopher] Accessibility is the hardest thing for me about maki...
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Accessibility is the hardest thing for me about making things for
the web
Author : tate
Score : 77 points
Date : 2021-05-21 17:18 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (gomakethings.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (gomakethings.com)
| seph-reed wrote:
| I'm all for arguments in favor of accessibility. That being said,
| this article is the exact _opposite_ of how to get many people
| (like me) on your side.
|
| > accessibility is literally your job. If you ignore it, you're
| just a hobbyist.
|
| ah yes, of all the issues and features on the list, this is the
| one that defines whether or not I'm doing my job.
|
| Point being, I don't think an article like this actually makes
| accessibility more of a concern overall... but who knows? Maybe
| people are more responsive to this than would be intuitive to me.
| 3grdlurker wrote:
| The phrasing is certainly provocative, but a truly
| conscientious person would pick a side on the basis of merit.
| There's hardly any point in reasoning with someone who's
| obviously looking to make a decision based on the emotions
| evoked by an article.
| dudul wrote:
| The thing is there isn't much in this article other than
| emotion. A sound thesis would examine (at least seemingly)
| legitimate arguments against accessibility.
|
| Another comment on this thread points out that
| designing/implementing accessibility comes at a cost. Why
| would money-tight companies use resources to do it?
|
| Maybe mention the market share represented by people who need
| accessible sites. Maybe provide the numbers for how many
| websites are truly accessible. Highlight the fact that by
| spending resources on it it could almost be akin to targeting
| a niche with very little competition.
|
| That's how you convince conscientious people, not by saying
| "if you don't do it, you're a fraud".
| 3grdlurker wrote:
| There are good articles that make for good, thought-
| provoking discussions, and then there simply are bad ones.
| pwillia7 wrote:
| sick burn
| at_a_remove wrote:
| I agree -- the tone of this article doesn't help, and it is
| mostly aimed at the wrong people.
|
| In reality, I was always told to hustle hustle hustle on the
| design. FUCK accessibility.
|
| I would have to counter to my masters with a stick (that Target
| ADA complaint) and a carrot (almost all accessibility is a
| medium-grade form of whitehat SEO that will increase rankings).
| The stick wasn't usually taken as being important, but that
| carrot ... whoo! Nibble nibble.
|
| In my web design days, I would _love_ for the chance to linger,
| to tweak, to test on browser after browser, to poll people at
| random. Breaking the design, then repairing it. However, we 're
| all so busy, aren't we?
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| You pulled the text straight out of my mind...
|
| Eventually I had to turn to self-directed unpaid development
| in order to do work I wasn't ashamed of.
| at_a_remove wrote:
| I have done various accessibility spiels on HN before.
|
| I think most people who are ... (and heaven help me, what
| do we even call this now? "Webmaster" is out, "web
| designers" seem to focus on almost anything else in the
| real world, "programmer" is too broad ...) people who are
| responsible what actual HTML tags and CSS attributes are
| assigned in the final output either care about this to some
| degree or simply haven't been introduced to the concept.
| Overall, we'd rather close our tags and put in the alt
| attributes and so on. There's nothing malign about it.
|
| However, the people who decide what our time will be spent
| on dismiss even the barest accessibility as soon as it hits
| their radars. Even when I could get "through" to them,
| well, it's all about what the client wants. And
| accessibility is a concern that ranges deeply enough
| through our efforts that we cannot simply squeeze it in as
| five percent, or a skunkworks project.
|
| I help out a little old lady (eighty-eight this year) and
| my mother with computer "stuff," and that's a whole
| dimension of accessibility which just gets ignored. Not
| every user of an application is some sharp-eyed twenty-
| something with fine motor control and an ingrained habit of
| scanning the UI for changes, and yet these people are
| effectively ignored.
|
| I am out of the webdev biz, and happily so, but this
| remains a point of lingering bitterness.
| [deleted]
| dudul wrote:
| Agreed - the perceived tone of the post is not very convincing.
| The sibling post ( https://gomakethings.com/theres-no-such-
| thing-as-a-website-o... ) is also really light on facts.
|
| "In many countries around the world, accessibility is a legal
| requirement." Would have been nice to name a few. AFAIK it's
| not that clear cut in the US for example. It depends on your
| industry, your physical presence (judges seem to apply the rule
| of thumb of "if you have accessible buildings to do business,
| your website must be too", etc).
| johncessna wrote:
| The root of the issue here is that information doesn't convey the
| same way across all mediums.
|
| If you have a graph that is reducing 1000 words to one image, the
| 'solution' to make it 508 compliant is to put the raw data in a
| way the screen reader can read it out. In the specific situation
| where I was asked to do that, I realized the goal wasn't
| accessibility, it was to comply with the regulation.
| avereveard wrote:
| > If what you built isn't accessible, it's not complete.
|
| I'll be here waiting until someone builds an accessible sketchup
| to prove this point. Until then, I'll call it for what it is,
| idealistic bullshit from people with limited experience of what
| the web can do.
| fctorial wrote:
| > Photo galleries and carousels (ex. <gallery> and <galleryitem>)
|
| Aren't you supposed to use lists for that?
| smegcicle wrote:
| it's easy to argue that accessibility is your job if you're
| billing yourself as a ui engineer, but i fear a lot of these poor
| saps are being paid to use js for a lot more than just ui
| marsven_422 wrote:
| What is the business value of accessibility?
| paxys wrote:
| - Not getting sued is generally #1
|
| - Large corporate customers have their own accessibility
| requirements for software they purchase, so if you want their
| business you have to be serious about it
|
| - You will have a slightly larger potential user base
|
| - Generates goodwill for the business
|
| - It helps your existing customers and fully abled users as
| well. Everyone can appreciate sensible keyboard shortcuts,
| tooltips, voice narration, good color contrast, font size etc.
|
| - It's generally the right thing to do
| jtolj wrote:
| #1.
|
| I run a SAAS product that helps digital agencies
| scan/monitor/remediate sites for accessibility issues, and
| unless one of their clients was recently sued I have a pretty
| low success rate getting them to start a trial.
|
| There could be a lot of other factors at play (I'm terrible
| at sales, my landing page isn't good enough, etc), but my
| sense is that it's not something that is on the radar for
| most small/medium agencies and freelancers.
|
| These are the folks that are building a whole lot of the web,
| including the local businesses that people using assistive
| technologies would really like to be able to access easily.
| shkkmo wrote:
| Perhaps your marketing efforts are directed in the wrong
| place. You are trying to convince digital agencies that
| they will be able to convince their customers of the value
| of accessibility. This sort of second order education is
| hard to pull off.
|
| You might have more luck trying to raise awareness among
| businesses directly. If businesses start asking their
| agency/developer about accessibility, you'll probably see
| better uptake rates.
| jtolj wrote:
| Definitely a possibility, as it not a route I've tried.
| As I mentioned I'm terrible at marketing and sales ;).
|
| My own experience working in a digital agency was pretty
| much the same though. If a client was sued or received a
| demand letter, they came to us asking about
| accessibility. When we brought it to the client, they
| often just saw it as us trying to upsell them.
|
| In the end, we just shot for WCAG AA on everything
| whether the client asked for it or not and built the
| additional testing into our costs.
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| Your developers aren't embarrassed of their own work and stick
| around longer :)
| matz1 wrote:
| More likely developer will stick around longer because they
| don't have to do annoying work.
| jpttsn wrote:
| And the point of TFA is to create this embarrassment by
| educating developers?
|
| I imagine this strategy is what remained after realizing not
| enough clients want to pay for accessibility.
| ericwood wrote:
| Making your website and apps usable to the highest number of
| people possible, and of course not opening yourself up to
| litigation. I've been on the receiving end and it is not fun!
|
| A lot of accessibility best-practices also benefit practically
| all of your users; keyboard navigation, proper contrast, etc.
| are a net positive to everyone.
| uberman wrote:
| I'll note that the SVG image on that page has a specifically
| empty <title /> tag. Not a missing one, but one that is
| intentionally empty.
|
| This is the way accessibility alt text should be provided with an
| SVG and highlights that even the simplest things are easier said
| than done.
| K0nserv wrote:
| That's perfectly fine. The SVG is within a link tag with the
| description "Go Make Things" and is purely decorative. It
| shouldn't be communicated to accessible technology.
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| Thank you! What a breath of fresh air this essay is.
|
| Accessibility is ability to access, regardless of method,
| configuration, and skill.
|
| Telling the user their browser, device, or configuration is not
| good enough, in a situation where you could have bent over
| backwards a little bit and made it work for them, is hobbyism, I
| agree completely.
|
| If a device is able to connect to your site and request the page,
| you should be able to accomodate it, regardless of age,
| configuration, CLOCK SETTING, and so on.
|
| ANY BROWSER is not a pipe dream, but an attainable reality, and
| just plain nice and polite.
|
| I've been able to almost single-handedly achieve support for all
| major browsers since Netscape 2.x, so I don't think it's beyond
| someone like Google to achieve the same. It makes me feel
| embarrassed for everyone involved when google.com search results
| are broken in a browser less than 10 years old.
| 5560675260 wrote:
| Personally I'm for an opposite approach - content that I
| produce is already a free gift to the world, so it's on a user
| to find a way and means to consume it. Should be a bit of a
| challenge, really.
| etaioinshrdlu wrote:
| It seems like in the startup world, accessibility is about the
| last priority.
|
| After all, if you're in the business of shipping half-finished
| software and rushing from one feature to the next in a mountain
| of tech debt, how on earth are you going to find the time to
| think about accessibility?
|
| Internet shaming aside, ignoring accessibility for a while seems
| like good business sense.
| leros wrote:
| Usually laws like this don't apply until you're a certain size,
| headcount or revenue. I'm not sure if that's the case with
| accessibility but usually startups building MVPs can focus on
| the product and come back to hit compliance once they start
| growing.
| amelius wrote:
| > It seems like in the startup world, accessibility is about
| the last priority.
|
| Right after security.
| threatofrain wrote:
| If you don't ship then nobody can access your product. If your
| product is more expensive than fewer people can access your
| product.
| paxys wrote:
| In the physical world you can't just ignore safety and
| accessibility requirements because "hey, it's expensive and
| if I don't open then no one will be able to visit my business
| at all. Might as well serve some percent of the population."
| Websites shouldn't be any different.
| threatofrain wrote:
| Financial access is an accessibility problem too. It makes
| sense to target the largest demographics by problem of
| access if you cannot help everyone.
|
| Also, when you have financial access issues, it implies
| that you have access issues for everything in life,
| including the basics like medical care.
| robbrown451 wrote:
| It depends. Safety... well that's different.
|
| But there are many physical products that can only be used
| by people without certain disabilities. For instance,
| cameras, mirrors, light bulbs and paintings require you to
| be sighted to get any utility from them. Headphones require
| you to be able to hear. Those might be extreme examples,
| but there are a huge number of things that you basically
| get zero utility out of if you don't have typical abilities
| in relevant areas. Should I not be allowed to sell a
| bicycle if I can't figure out a way to make it work for
| people who don't have 4 functioning limbs?
|
| Most web sites can be made accessible simply by making them
| work normally and reasonably... it's generally the
| browser's job (and various other things like screenreaders)
| to make them accessible, assuming the web developer isn't
| doing something particularly weirdly. Isn't it?
|
| It seems highly inefficient use of resources to have each
| site have to do a lot of work to support accessibility,
| especially if the sites are doing basic things like
| presenting documents. But if I make a web based paint
| program or charting app, what am I supposed to do for
| people who don't have sight? Does that even make sense?
| IanCal wrote:
| I think you should actually read about accessibility
| requirements.
|
| > Most web sites can be made accessible simply by making
| them work normally and reasonably... it's generally the
| browser's job (and various other things like
| screenreaders) to make them accessible, assuming the web
| developer isn't doing something particularly weirdly.
| Isn't it?
|
| It's not the browsers legal responsibility to do so, no.
| It's the responsibility of the business to do that.
| robbrown451 wrote:
| I'm not talking about whose legal responsibility it is,
| I'm talking about whose responsibility it makes sense for
| it to be. Anyway, if the browser did nothing to address
| accessibility, laws would be made to require them to do
| so.
|
| It makes sense to address it universally, if possible,
| rather than case by case. Surely you agree that someone
| who simply puts a document on the web should not have to
| develop their own screen reader. Or should it just be
| businesses that are required to do so? That has obvious
| problems.
| fassssst wrote:
| And that's the reason the modern world sucks for a lot of
| people. Imagine living in a world where people don't design
| for you because it's not economically worth it.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| I'm a Linux user. It sucks but you deal.
| IanCal wrote:
| Someone who is colourblind can't just switch to better
| supported eyes.
| matz1 wrote:
| Likewise imagine living in a world where you are forced to
| do work where its not economically worth it, thats really
| sucks.
| fassssst wrote:
| Software generally has high margins. There's no excuse.
| matz1 wrote:
| Being paid a lot doesn't necessarily make the job less
| annoying.
| [deleted]
| robbrown451 wrote:
| Seems like it was far more that way in the pre-modern
| world.... even a few decades ago.
| pradn wrote:
| At least for SaaS websites, I imagine you're limiting who can
| buy your software if you don't comply with relevant a11y
| guidelines - think government, healthcare, and some big
| companies etc.
| codingdave wrote:
| Section 508 and ADA laws are quite real, and there are
| activists out there literally just looking for websites to sue
| who do not meet those requirements. You need to balance launch
| and revenue with the risk that you'll get sued and the cost of
| the consequences.
|
| I'm not disagreeing with you, BTW... just saying that for the
| decision to be good business sense you need to look at the full
| potential impact on the business.
| etaioinshrdlu wrote:
| Are they really risks though? Are there any examples of say,
| YC-stage startups who got sued into oblivion over
| accessibility?
|
| It just kind of feels like a joke, when almost any webapp in
| existence is not compliant and there is no enforcement.
|
| It also goes against the hacker ethos that we should be free
| to build and share without credentialing or licensing.
|
| Imagine if you couldn't Show HN without thinking about
| accessibility and actually taking on serious legal risk.
| extra88 wrote:
| > YC-stage startups who got sued into oblivion over
| accessibility
|
| No, because real people with problems (not lawsuit trolls)
| don't want your money, they want you to fix your product.
| Most will reach out before bringing a suit. If a suit is
| brought, they almost always settle if the company A) fixes
| the problem and commits to keeping the product accessible
| and B) pays the costs of the suit.
|
| It's cheaper to fix the problems than to fight the suit,
| especially for a new business that doesn't have a lot of
| technical debt or a large corpus of inaccessible content.
|
| > Imagine if you couldn't Show HN without thinking about
| accessibility and actually taking on serious legal risk.
|
| U.S. accessibility requirements for private entities (vs.
| government ones) apply to "places of public accommodation."
| Lawsuit results have been mixed about whether an online
| operation, especially if it has no corresponding physical
| operation, count as a "place" (I think they do). Personal
| sites, projects will not require meeting accessibility
| requirements any more than your house will be legally
| required to have a ramp for wheelchair users.
|
| If you're going to worry about legal risks for Show HN
| projects, worry more about creating privacy and security
| problems for users.
| TheAdamAndChe wrote:
| How does it work on the web? Would developers get an
| opportunity to fix the issues, or would the company randomly
| get slapped with a massive fine?
|
| It seems like it would be a good way for a company to
| suppress competitors to a field, they could trigger these
| kinds of laws in up-and-coming companies.
| codingdave wrote:
| It ends up going to the OCR (Office of Civil Rights). They
| will independently verify whether or not there are
| problems. If there are, the organization who owns the site
| will be contacted and made aware of the concerns. They will
| get an opportunity to correct the problems.
|
| And yes, you certainly could audit your competitors
| products and force them down this path. I'm not sure that
| is a winning move, though, as all you are doing is forcing
| them to build a stronger product.
| paxys wrote:
| At a base level HTML is very accessible by default. It's the
| layers upon layers of fancy CSS and JS people pile on top which
| makes it a nightmare.
| AnonC wrote:
| > If you're a web developer, accessibility is literally your job.
| If you ignore it, you're just a hobbyist.
|
| Just as if you ignore security, privacy, responsiveness and
| performance of the site, you're just a hobbyist. Enterprises
| usually hide behind budgets and quarterly numbers not to do most
| of these things.
|
| Accessibility is not for "other people" or "disabled people".
| There are people who tend to think that way. It's actually for
| yourself and everyone else. Without accessibility features, even
| the average normie would have a much tougher life.
| josephorjoe wrote:
| I don't get why it is considered useful to denigrate hobbyists
| to score internet points.
|
| If you regularly get paid to do something, it is your job.
|
| Maybe you are good at your job. Maybe you are not. Maybe some
| people think you are and others think you aren't.
|
| If you do something without getting paid to do it, it is likely
| a hobby.
|
| Maybe you are good at your hobby. Maybe you are not. Maybe some
| people think you are and others think you aren't.
|
| I get paid to create, update, and maintain software. That is my
| job. If I'm doing my job poorly, that does not make me a
| "hobbyist". It makes me someone who does his job poorly.
|
| One of my hobbies is playing guitar. And no matter how good I
| get at playing, until the day someone pays me to play the
| guitar, I'm still a hobbyist.
|
| There are many hobbyist guitarists whose musical skill level is
| equal to or greater than the skill level of professional
| guitarists. And while you may sometimes hear a talented
| hobbyist guitarist lament that some untalented guitarist became
| wealthy playing simple songs, it would never make sense to
| anyone to claim that the 3 chord playing rock star could or
| should be denigrated by labeling him a "hobbyist".
| BigToach wrote:
| Yeah, I hate this job/hobby analogy. If a Dr. doesn't do part
| of their job (regardless of the reasoning) it doesn't turn
| them into a hobbyist...
| xgulfie wrote:
| Ah yes "no true developer"
| [deleted]
| calkuta wrote:
| Yeah yeah, I'll go ahead and keep doing things however I want,
| thank you!
| legerdemain wrote:
| But it's not my job! My job is what my team tech lead says my job
| is, what my CTO says my job is, what my team agrees my job is.
| There is a million vital things we could build into the software,
| why is this one the uniquely important one? Go change business
| culture first and, when you're done, come back and tell me what
| my job is.
| blacktriangle wrote:
| Yes keep insulting working developers accessibility advocates,
| that'll surely work this time.
|
| Seriously, accessibility is hard. There's no single standard or
| spec I can look at, a bunch of disabilities I've never even heard
| of, no standard test suite to pass, and a bunch of specialized
| hardware I should be testing on but can't afford and even if I
| could I don't have time. Reading accessibility blogs by
| professionals in that field is a minefield since they aren't even
| able to come up with a coherent narrative among themselves.
|
| Know what my job is? Responding to the pile of functionality
| requests my paying customers have asked for. Know how many of
| them are related to accessibility? Zero.
|
| I WANT my application to be accessible. It's good karma, it's
| good for people I know who are disabled, its good for my
| customer's employees, its good for getting government contracts.
| But accessibility is difficult, expensive, and meshes poorly with
| the short development cycles that are the hallmark of the startup
| space.
|
| So how about you assholes stop insulting me and start coming up
| with some solutions?
| mukesh610 wrote:
| Please be mindful of the other person. Some parts of your
| comment do not exactly stand as a good example of this website.
| bubbab wrote:
| For me, the biggest hurdle has been education and awareness. At
| least a few years ago, the courses and resources I used to learn
| about web development didn't cover accessibility, and I had to
| learn about it after the fact. I'm glad to see more introductory
| resources cover it now though, like the MDN docs and web.dev.
| dstaley wrote:
| I love that there's a call for more UX patterns to be built into
| native elements, but I really wish there was a massive push to
| develop better a11y tooling for developers. Chromium has the A11y
| Tree View, but it's so noisy that as someone who isn't intimately
| familiar with the interaction pattern of screen readers, I can't
| easily digest where the issues are.
|
| I'd love to see a purpose-built browser that "renders" your site
| purely by the a11y tree, but in a layout similar to how a site
| might look. That'd make it super easy to see missing buttons,
| links, uninteractable elements, etc. I'm sure there's efforts
| within browser developers to do this, but it's frustrating that
| most of the work is being spent just telling developers their
| sites are inaccessible rather than giving them the tooling to
| help make their sites accessible.
| matwood wrote:
| This 100%. There's the tree view and tools to make sure tags
| are there. Some tools to check that the site is keyboard
| navigable. But I still find I have to go through with a janky
| screen reader plugin to make sure (the best I can) that the
| site really works for screen readers.
|
| The main problem is that as a sighted user, I'm used to
| scanning a site and discarding tons of superfluous information.
| If all that is read to someone it is tedious and very hard to
| navigate with. In many ways, the developer needs to think of an
| entirely new UX for a user on a screen reader. Hiding repeated
| elements is one of the biggest things to be done. Do the items
| for the screen reader have context is another. On a graphical
| page a button with the word "GO" might make complete sense. It
| makes a lot less sense when being read to a non-sighted user
| after listening to a bunch of other elements.
| ziolko wrote:
| You might like ARIA DevTools, which is my open-source Chrome
| plugin doing exactly that
|
| Link: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/aria-
| devtools/dnee...
| dstaley wrote:
| Oh my goodness. It's wonderful. This needs to be part of
| browsers by default! The only suggestion I have so far is
| it'd be pretty nice for it to be a tab in the dev tools,
| potentially with element highlighting as I hover over the
| nodes.
| ziolko wrote:
| Actually this is not the first time someone is asking
| specifically about this. I haven't worked on this extension
| much recently, but perhaps it's time to give it more love
| :)
| Etheryte wrote:
| I can't help but disagree with the premise: at a basic level,
| accessibility is not hard. It is hard to consistently check all
| the boxes for WCAG AAA, but let's be honest, this is not where
| the trouble starts. Most sites fail on basic issues and this
| isn't a for a lack of resources. Case in point, Bootstrap, the
| most widely used frontend library by far, has only recently
| started thoroughly addressing accessibility concerns in their
| code examples and snippets. Prior to this it was a mix and match
| of the good, the bad and the ugly. I completely agree with
| another commenter that tooling does have a very long way to come
| with regards to accessibility. Better tools make for better
| software, as witnessed by linters, fuzzers, testing frameworks
| and the like. But even more so education. You can easily teach
| someone with basic knowledge of web dev the core concepts of
| accessibility in a day, a crash course in even less time would
| also be completely manageable. Sadly, this is not a topic that
| I've seen any uni or code boot camp cover in a reasonable
| stretch.
| open-source-ux wrote:
| I agree. For anyone creating websites (not web apps),
| accessibility is not that difficult if you follow HTML5
| semantic markup. Or put another way, you don't have to 'bolt-
| on' accessibility as another layer on your markup -
| accessibility comes already built-in; you get it for free.
|
| Where it isn't accessible is when you're using a JavasScript
| framework that generates non-semantic markup. Or you're using a
| CSS framework and your HTML markup is littered with endless
| <divs> rather than HTML semantic tags.
|
| Here's the thing: HTML is _easy_. It 's CSS that is the
| monster. (But bearable in its modern incarnation with features
| like Flexbox and CSS grid.)
| asoneth wrote:
| > accessibility is not hard
|
| This has not been my experience based on my involvement in
| accessibility efforts at two medium-to-large companies that
| decided to make their existing web-based products accessible to
| blind and low-vision users.
|
| In one of the cases we brought in accessibility consultants,
| created a usability testing pool of users with various vision
| and motor impairments, conducted training for dozens of front-
| end developers, revised our framework, and made changes to many
| product UIs. After several years and millions of dollars of
| effort a few products were functionally usable by blind and
| vision-impaired users. Note that this is distinct from being
| WCAG compliant, which is a good place to start but doesn't
| guarantee your product is actually accessible. I think it was
| the right choice and it made our products better for everyone,
| but it was Very Hard and it required buy-in up to the executive
| level.
|
| I'd consider it grossly unfair to blame individual developers
| or call them "hobbyists" solely based on the fact that they
| worked for years on products that did not have good
| accessibility. If anything, the assumption that accessibility
| is something an individual developer who is sufficiently
| "professional" can just choose to add to their interfaces makes
| me suspect either the author lacks experience working in a
| medium/large development organization or they are just
| targeting WCAG compliance rather than functional accessibility.
| api wrote:
| Accessibility is the hill upon which most independent UI toolkits
| like Dear Imgui die. Once you look into accessibility you are
| restricted to native, Qt, or Electron for any serious work.
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(page generated 2021-05-21 23:01 UTC)