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Discussion on: What can a backend dev do to improve Accessibility?

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pclundaahl profile image
Patrick Charles-Lundaahl

Just spit-balling here, but some things to consider might be:

Internationalization. Have your API allow the frontend to pass in a localization field as a header.

Let users change their email addresses, usernames, etc. easily.

Provide support for users who have names that don't conform to standard western conventions. Let people use characters beyond the standard ASCII range. Similar considerations should probably be given to phone number formatting.

Make it easy for users to delete their data.

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pclundaahl profile image
Patrick Charles-Lundaahl

To add to that, if you have any sort of profile data, give users the option to specify non-binary honorifics/pronouns, and maybe preferred name (if you need to capture their full/legal name for whatever reason). This lets you be more welcoming in marketing/support emails. Also, let people change their pronouns.

Another one: if you give users profile pages that are publically accessible via a named path, a) let them change that path, and b) don't allow other people to take that profile path afterwards (keep it locked to the original owner).

Right, enough of my blabbing. Stoked to see what else people come up with!

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vickilanger profile image
Vicki Langer

I definitely agree that people need to be able to change their details. I think it's also important to mention that users should be assigned a unique user ID#. I've noticed some sites don't do this and they use the username as the identifier.