Notes · 18 July 2020
The necessary work of accessibility
An accessible site is a sign of a designer who has finished the job.
Every site I make passes WCAG AA. Not because of legal requirements, though those exist. Not because the client asked, though some do. Because an accessible site is a sign of a designer who has finished the job, and an inaccessible site is a sign of a designer who has not.
A few things I keep finding myself explaining to clients and to designers earlier in their careers.
Accessibility is not a separate “phase” of a project. There is no point at which the studio “does the accessibility pass”. The work is done as the work is being made, by the designer making it. If you find yourself adding ARIA attributes at the end of a project to make a screen-reader test pass, you have already lost. The structure underneath was wrong.
Accessibility is, in nearly every case, just good design. Better contrast helps everyone. Larger touch targets help everyone. Clear focus states help everyone. Text alternatives for images help everyone. Forms that work without JavaScript help everyone. The number of accessibility patterns that visibly degrade the experience for sighted, mouse-using, broadband-connected users is approximately zero.
Accessibility is not the same as “compliance”. A site can technically meet WCAG and still be a misery to use with a screen reader. The only useful test is to actually try it. VoiceOver ships with macOS and iOS. NVDA is free on Windows. Both will teach you more in twenty minutes than any compliance audit.
A few resources that have shaped my work on this:
The A11y Project is the cleanest single starting point. The checklist is shorter than most designers expect.
Inclusive Components by Heydon Pickering is the best thing written on the topic in the last decade. Read it whether or not you have a current project that needs it.
MDN’s accessibility section is the reference to keep open.
The studios that handle this well are not the ones with the loudest accessibility statement on their about page. They are the ones whose work, sampled at random, just happens to pass.