Ignorance and inspiration. I’m pretty gobsmacked at the levels of ignorance about web accessibility out there—it’s not that hard people! I’m obviously more out of touch with mainstream developers than I thought; I was under the impression that people had generally got the message.
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A while ago I read this post: http://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1188895731&count=1
It made me feel like accessibility advocates had hoodwinked me. But I can't say I'm entirely surprised; the story accessibility advocates were giving never quite made sense. It lacked a certain internal consistency.
So I'm not sure what level of accessibility I should really be shooting for. There's lots of truisms, but I don't feel like there's much in the way of hard facts that I can trust. What do blind people really use? How many such users are there? Given a particular level of traffic, is there a good chance that there are no blind users at all? Do their platforms support Javascript? In what way? What markup works best? What about people who aren't blind, but just need screen magnifiers or other tools? Do they need special help at all, or do they get by alright?
I suspect that the only way to really understand this is to actually use the tools myself. But I can't, they are expensive (I'm not even sure which are representative) and I'm not going to specialize in accessibility.
Ian Bicking - 16th October 2007 00:03 - #
Ian: you raise some very interesting (and valid) points about high end accessibility advice - but the people in the threads Jeremy links to are unaware of even the most basic principles. Many of them seem completely unaware that blind people even use the Web!
The vast majority of common accessibility issues can be addressed with just a few best practices: provide appropriate alt text, use headers, use labels to describe forms and avoid complex layout tables. If you take a standards-based approach to front end development you probably do all of these things already. The basics really aren't rocket science, and there are endless excellent tutorials covering them.
www.target.com is a fantastic example of how not to do things - much of their navigation is a giant image map with no alt attribute for example. I'm willing to bet that if they'd stuck to the few points above the inevitable lawsuit would have been targeted at some other company instead.