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Discussion on: 🤷‍♂️ W1y d2s a11y h2e to be so b4y c9d a1d i10e? 👿

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grahamthedev profile image
GrahamTheDev • Edited

I agree with every single word of this. 💪

When I said it was easy what I meant was once you understand each element and attribute and why it is relevant you can put stuff together in a few key strokes.

I admit I think I did underplay the "knowledge" part - but that is I suppose my point. When starting out you don't need more than the basic knowledge of those 5 points, what you really need is a resource that goes "trying to make a custom select, here are 3 skeletons you can copy paste and here is what you can and can't do with them". I mean, I know it would still result in some mistakes but I think it solves the "overwhelm" that puts so many developers off.

Some of the comments here have made me realise that perhaps we are heading in the wrong direction because there are now more and more frameworks. I could give you a React example of how to do something but if you are new you aren't going to understand how to implement that in Vue or Angular.

The final nugget of wisdom you said there was "keep it simple" - the amount of times people start using ARIA to add role="navigation" to a <div> instead of just <nav>...is it any wonder people "switch off" to accessibility! Not sure if over use of WAI-ARIA is HTML 4 legacy or just that there is so much erroneous information out there!

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riobrewster profile image
RioBrewster

There is that much erroneous information in the WCAG/WAI documentation. I found a thread on github where they have been arguing about whether a navigation menu is a real menu since 2017!
They all pretty much agree that navigation is not a menu - BUT THEN SHOW ME THE CODE that JAWS will read AND works with the keyboard AND creates an intuitive menu for sighted users on different devices.

Are any of these people developers with actual work to do and actual projects with actual deadlines?

I mean I want to make my (internal) site inclusive - but make it easy so I can actually do it.