Conversations around web accessibility
Short discussions with disabled people about the barriers they encounter on the web. Hear about web accessibility in our own words!
Dave says accessibility comes down to simplicity. And I think there is elegance in simplicity. But so many times we see all the bells and whistles that pop up on a website that people think gives it an elegant beauty or makes it makes it more pleasurable to the eye. What ends up happening is it makes the website more difficult to use. And that isn’t to say that simple can’t be beautiful.
Ben Lesh says if you can do your best to actually get the users focus on what matters and kind of limit the noisiness of the other things that would be a big deal for certain folks.
Mike tells us about automating accessibility: “as a blind consumer, of content, information, whatever, I don’t care where I get it, as long as I get it. Information is what I need.”
Thane tells us that CAPTCHAS with time outs are the worse. He types very slowly and sometimes he can’t type the CAPTCHA in time. And the picture ones can be difficult to solve on occasion.
Di tells us that to make the web more difficult than it needs to be for disabled people is a shitty thing to do. And it doesn’t reflect well on you.
Multiple accessibility experts discuss the importance of the default focus style.
Julieanne King tells us that super thin, font strokes, really, really skinny lettering, and using like a medium gray font color cause a problem for a lot of users on the web.
Julieanne says when she’s information seeking, trying to accomplish a task, movement on the screen, that is not something that she causes to happen or choose to happen can absolutely derail her.
Tori points out that using speech input like Dragon Naturally Speaking is hard when there’s no visual label, or the visual label doesn’t match the programmatic label.
She also says that developers need to understand that assistive technology users is a category of users that encompass more than just screen reader users.
Ted explains how using switch inputs, such as the Darcy USB keyboard, can take a lot longer than other input methods. He also tells us to properly label and markup interactive elements!
