industryterm:web dev buys

  • Accessibility – what is it good for? | Marco’s accessibility blog
    http://www.marcozehe.de/2012/10/22/accessibility-what-is-it-good-for

    This blog post is by no means about diminishing the accomplishments the #accessibility community has made. But we need to go beyond that! We need to leave our comfortable niche and turn the accessibility extra way into the #standards way. Make people use headings, correct form element labeling, and other stuff just because it is the right thing to do that benefits everyone, not because “it’s an accessibility requirement”. Accessibility needs to finally shake off the smell of being an unloved burden to meet some government criteria. Every book any web dev buys must simply state as a #best_practice, without mentioning accessibility at all, that for labeling an input one uses the label element, and that the for attribute of that label element needs to point to the id of the input to be labeled. As a test case, state that this way, a user can also click on the label to get the cursor right. Don’t bother people with screen readers at all. They don’t need to know for these things.

    We must get to a point where teachers give their students lesser grade if they deliver semantically incorrect work. An excuse like “but it works” should not be enough to get a good grade.

    Cent fois oui, on en est déjà bien là quand je participe à des formations.

    #accessibilité #qualité

    • Voir aussi, un commentaire de Kevin Potts :

      The main problem, having been invested in the accessibility community since 2003, is that accessibility is seen as a checklist. Legislature such as Section 508 promotes this way of thinking — “make sure you check 0ff this, this, this and this and boom your site is accessible”. Checklists are easy to reference. Developers love them because lints and validators can be written against them.

      The reality is that accessibility is a philosophy. It is a mindset. A strategy. A tenant. This is the brilliance of WCAG2.0 that most from the sidelines fail to grasp. It uses words like “perceivable” and “understandable” — abstractions that try to convey that accessibility is foundational, not something that cannot be tacked onto the end of a project.