Accessibility Experiment. Joe Walker asks what would happen if we threw away the idea of serving the same accessible site to every user and instead tried building specific versions aimed at different disabilities.
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Accessibility Experiment. Joe Walker asks what would happen if we threw away the idea of serving the same accessible site to every user and instead tried building specific versions aimed at different disabilities.
The web has already tried this technique out and it failed miserably.
Way back before accessibility was a buzzword, text-only alternative sites were the popular response to accessibility needs. Invariably, the text-only versions were out of date, badly maintained, and generally a second-class citizen. Further, the "full" websites degraded in quality, as the developers felt free to use all the shitty techniques like
href="javascript:popup()"that accessibility concerns were protecting normal people from.If that's what self-motivated people who care about accessibility managed, then I dread to think what the result would be if you suggest this technique to people who are only doing it to comply with the DDA.
Perhaps web frameworks and template systems have matured to the point where the maintenance burden is not an issue, but I still think that there's a good chance that that promoting this technique can do more harm than good.
Joe isn't trying to promote this technique to the "tick-the-accessibility-box" crowd, he's exploring what happens when developers who are accessibility fanatics free themselves from the constraint of having one site that fits all and attempt to address specific issues with specific site versions. I think that's a really interesting thought experiment, even if for most sites it isn't practical.