I recently came across the following website, Mother Fucking Website (Warning: Contains Bad Language). The general thesis of this site, is that the web was designed, structured and standardised to be accessible, lightweight, and responsive by default. This got me thinking a little more about how I thought about the web, my responsibility as a web developer, and the best practices and processes I use in my current role as web developer.
Despite knowing full well that a plain un-styled, un-scripted HTML website was of course fast and accessible, it challenged a paradigm I held as a developer, that it was my responsibility to make a website accessible, lightweight and responsive rather than to avoid making things inaccessible in the first place.
To truly be mindful of accessibility and develop first class accessible applications, websites and digital content, we need to challenge our way of thinking. We must develop with accessibility as one of our primary focuses. We should instead shift our thinking to how best to create new functionality, components or features without breaking the existing accessibility of the site. It's my belief that by adopting this new paradigm we can develop accessible websites with far more efficiency, and with far less accessibility issues.
Not only will this provide a great deal of value to your development team, your organisation will immediately see the benefits with a more user friendly, SEO friendly and navigable website.
So next time someone tells you to make things accessible, tell them that instead you don't intent to make it inaccessible in the first place.
Top comments (1)
I recently saw the same site, and had very similar thoughts! I read a couple articles afterwards to brush up on semantic HTML and learned a ton. Definitely made me think about taking things back to basics, and starting from the ground up with the accessibility building blocks HTML5 provides us. Nice post :)