As a developer I have noticed that most web sites out there fail when supporting the wide range of people who are meant to get into the accessibility standard. Why?
I really want to believe that it's due to vagrancy on our commitment. But the real fact is that must of us rely on third party software to develope web sites, apps, software or whatever.
Take an easy example. If you build a web site using WordPress, you probably are using a template which code will be away from your easy manipulation without installing some plugins and plugins of that plugin (yeah, Elementor, I'm looking at you). So, it would be an extremely hardorous a task implementing accessibility if it was not included by the developers who built our framework of choice.
That's my humble opinion.
Accessibility First DevRel. I focus on ensuring content created, events held and company assets are as accessible as possible, for as many people as possible.
You see this one is a bit of a chicken and egg scenario.
People don't demand accessibility (because they are unaware of how much inaccessibility is hurting their conversion rates etc.) so developers who know nothing about accessibility build website themes.
Then the people who do care / wake up to the business impact of accessibility have a really hard time finding a theme that is accessible (I have yet to see one, loads that claim to be, but often are not and what they really mean is "scored 100 on Lighthouse or Axe" - which I suppose is a start at least!
If everyone insisted on accessible websites then fewer developers would have to learn the detail as the hard parts would be handled automatically....hence chicken and egg!
It isn't vagrancy (on the most part) it is lack of motivation (you might want to make things accessible but your boss does not care and doesn't allow an extra few minutes for it) and lack of education (I mean, their can't be that many people using screen readers / with vision impairments surely?).
It is the same argument we see with supporting Internet Explorer. "But there are very few people using IE in our visitor logs"....well of course not, they have already come to your site, realised they can't use it and gone elsewhere.
Same with people with disabilities "We don't have any disabled customers" - are you sure, I mean, how do you know that (most disabilities are invisible) and secondly same principle - of course you don't if your business is not accessible, they are off spending money with your competitors who are accessible (or at least make the effort).
Ahhhh - I am ranting again, must stop!!!! 🤣
Thank you for the comment, it yet again points us to the same major issues and helps focus my thoughts on this.
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As a developer I have noticed that most web sites out there fail when supporting the wide range of people who are meant to get into the accessibility standard. Why?
I really want to believe that it's due to vagrancy on our commitment. But the real fact is that must of us rely on third party software to develope web sites, apps, software or whatever.
Take an easy example. If you build a web site using WordPress, you probably are using a template which code will be away from your easy manipulation without installing some plugins and plugins of that plugin (yeah, Elementor, I'm looking at you). So, it would be an extremely hardorous a task implementing accessibility if it was not included by the developers who built our framework of choice.
That's my humble opinion.
You see this one is a bit of a chicken and egg scenario.
People don't demand accessibility (because they are unaware of how much inaccessibility is hurting their conversion rates etc.) so developers who know nothing about accessibility build website themes.
Then the people who do care / wake up to the business impact of accessibility have a really hard time finding a theme that is accessible (I have yet to see one, loads that claim to be, but often are not and what they really mean is "scored 100 on Lighthouse or Axe" - which I suppose is a start at least!
If everyone insisted on accessible websites then fewer developers would have to learn the detail as the hard parts would be handled automatically....hence chicken and egg!
It isn't vagrancy (on the most part) it is lack of motivation (you might want to make things accessible but your boss does not care and doesn't allow an extra few minutes for it) and lack of education (I mean, their can't be that many people using screen readers / with vision impairments surely?).
It is the same argument we see with supporting Internet Explorer. "But there are very few people using IE in our visitor logs"....well of course not, they have already come to your site, realised they can't use it and gone elsewhere.
Same with people with disabilities "We don't have any disabled customers" - are you sure, I mean, how do you know that (most disabilities are invisible) and secondly same principle - of course you don't if your business is not accessible, they are off spending money with your competitors who are accessible (or at least make the effort).
Ahhhh - I am ranting again, must stop!!!! 🤣
Thank you for the comment, it yet again points us to the same major issues and helps focus my thoughts on this.