I’ve just read the blog post from Nic, called You’re not a front-end developer until you’ve…(opens in new window) and thought to apply the concept to add my personal view, but with accessibility in mind.
Without any particular order (and absolutely not a final list, just a quick brain dump).
So, here we go, you’re not an accessibility specialist until you’ve:
- presented an accessibility audit report to stakeholders, checked after a year and found same issues with new variations,
- used hours to document an accessibility issue and how to fix it, just to see the JIRA (or any other project management) task to disappear back into the black hole called backlog,
- heard that accessibility is constraining design too much and that they will add this as an known issue to their accessibility statement,
- had to explain that color contrast has nothing to do with screen readers when you pointed out poor contrast found on text,
- had to explain, for the thousand time, that icon buttons need to be named,
- pointed out that status messages need to work with a screen reader as well,
- had to show developers how to properly connect label to the input field,
- had to explain why “here” is a very poor link name, and sometimes its cousin “click here” can also fail WCAG,
- watched a blind screen reader user in a user test struggle because somebody used wrong ARIA attributes,
- seen an end user test discover basic issues that you have warned about months ago, but still got stakeholders surprised,
- had to remind people to test with keyboards, yes, even on their touch only devices,
- needed to remove over-engineered ARIA,
- needed to explain why div itself is not a good choice for any interactive element,
- had to remind people to use aria-expanded on the button and not on the target,
- been silenced when a feature release was not accessible, but had to be released in time, because shareholders demand it,
- argued with SEO about image alternative texts on stock images that were not adding anything to the content and lost,
- before even reading a page – opened developer tools to check for accessibility issues,
- started a screen reader to go through a site on mobile just to check if they know their accessibility that they “strive to conform to”,
- tried to use voice control and gave up as your English pronunciation triggered unplanned things,
- wanted to buy a refreshable braille display, but the one you wanted costed more than all your devices combined,
- presented accessibility to people and wanted to share too much information at the same time,
- dreaming of being proactive member instead of doing webpage and app autopsies,
- proving that AI is still not ready to implement accessibility on it’s own,
- reading poor contrast text from yet another company betting on accessibility just before European Accessibility Act,
- having to test yet another “AI powered automatic testing tool” that is just using axe and ChatGPT behind it’s new user interface,
- getting a “thank you, we are working on it” message (or not even that) from a company after sending them a gentle reminder that their website is not accessible and pointing out some issues.
- …
I could go on, but this is it for now folks.
And I am absolutely positive you have a list or even multiple lists of your own – please do share.
This all sounds so familiar, but I laughed out loud at “before even reading a page – opened developer tools to check for accessibility issues”. This is essentially a reflex.
Thanks for letting me know 🙂
Indeed, a reflex, or some may even call it professional deformation.
Let’s add this one to the list.
When you visit a blog post about accessibility but first must solve a CAPTCHA!
Absolutely. Sorry about that.
Hosting provider uses (D)DoS protection on server level and it is sometimes too sensitive.
Will let them know, but in these AI and bot harvester times it’s difficult.
And sad that we need to solve CAPTCHAs more and more to get to the content…
Hi. I think I pass muster.
Hi, thanks for your comment.
Absolutely, everybody is welcome and am sure we all have bunch of anecdotes.
I love the use of the word “autopsy” for an accessibility test. I have used it myself to describe the process of examining the rotting corpse of a project that cannot be saved, hoping to reveal lessons that could save future generations of projects, while knowing that those lessons will be forgotten or ignored.
Fortunately, that is all in the past, as accessibility is now baked into all the frameworks and AI generates perfectly accessible code, having been trained on the millions of websites that incorporate accessibility best practices. And then I woke up.
Thank you for your comment.
Hehe, exactly, we now also have European Accessibility Act and suddenly all of e-commerce is just accessible for everybody. At least they say that in their copy pasted accessibility statements and marketing materials.