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Alvaro Montoro
Alvaro Montoro

Posted on • Originally published at alvaromontoro.com

Myth: Accessibility is difficult

There is an all-in-one article including every part from this series (if you want prefer to read it all at once instead of "by installments")

We often hear this term when a project is at an advanced stage and not accessible. "Accessibility is difficult!" As if it was a justifiable reason because of all the delays they are experiencing.

But there's nothing further from the truth. Accessibility is not difficult. Do you know what's difficult? Running at an Olympic level. Even more, just running is difficult. A baby needs 12 months to start crawling, walking, and finally running. It's a slow process that requires strengthening the muscles, getting coordination, practice, practice, and more practice.

A young woman and a young man athletes prepare to run in a training hall

Alt text is difficult? Try running 100m in under 10 seconds (picture: Andrea Piacquadio)
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On the other hand, a Web Developer can learn at least the basics of Web Accessibility within hours, practice within days, and have a good grasp within weeks. Of course, they won't be experts. Still, they would be able to fix and prevent many of the issues highlighted in the WebAIM Million report and avoid the main accessibility issues that plague the Internet nowadays.

Obviously, there are more things to Web Accessibility than just the basics. Learning and mastering more advanced approaches takes time, but a good enough level is possible within a reasonable time.

Latest comments (1)

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Raphael

Yeah, it's one thing to be just starting out and learning HTML/CSS/JS and not be good at accessibility, but if you're advanced enough to be working on a big project, you should certainly know at least something about how to make it accessible. It's not actually that it's hard to learn and implement, they simply don't care enough to.