This post will be a bit more personal than posts I wrote before. I’m on vacation now, finally, so please bear with me. At the same time this is also the third anniversary of my accessibility blogging (first post made on 14th of August 2019). Wow, time really goes fast.
When I was a kid I wanted to either be a detective or a paleontologist. That was before abundance of information that we got with internet. And it was before Hollywood made dinosaurs “main stream” popular and also before detectives were full blown action heroes. I was really inspired by reading books and popular science magazines. And that idea was slowly deleted from my mind. School and life can do that to us.
But when I started with my accessibility journey something brought back my childhood ambitions. Opening developer tools to dig into “forensic proof” felt just like a detective trying to prevent a crime to happen. If we think about it – in some countries it is against the law to have inaccessible websites – so accessibility audit may be seen as real detective work. Sometimes maybe even saving real lives, who knows.
Digging into design, code and content to find what must be improved and what works fine is really rewarding. It’s not only that, we can finally make a real change to good in the world. Digital world, but still – world. I’m still on the start of my journey to be an expert accessibility detective, but it really inspires me when I can detect problems and come with suggestions on how to fix them.
Like detectives need to follow laws, professional guidelines, ethics and so on we as accessibility analysts have to as well. Sometimes we may be motivated to find an error just to fail a success criterion and that’s not really what we should do. It’s quite easy to find WCAG fails when you look for them. Unfortunately. But it’s not so easy to find barriers that really matter to folks. And it’s also not easy to come with suggestions on how to fix them.
This is also the part I like – we are not looking for errors just to fail success criteria. We have to provide solutions that make user’s experiences better. So with this we are a bit more than just website detectives, we have to help designers, developers and content providers to obey the law and make things accessible to users.
