Did you catch accessibility too?

[jeshyr]

[OK I have been meaning to post this for about a month and I keep putting it off on account of not having the right phrasing, but hey ... wrong phrasing will have to do]

My basic question is to those developers/volunteers/users of Dreamwidth who are NOT themselves users of accessibility technology...

I know that a bunch of folks here have become accessibility converts/evangelists. By which I mean that you're not just "doing accessibility" because Dreamwidth requires you to, but you're really understanding why it's necessary and important and often you're pointing this out to others in other contexts away from Dreamwidth too.

I know that a project can require people to "do" accessibility, but a project can't make people *care* about accessibility... and most projects that "do" accessibility at all are in the first category. So ... how did you come to care about accessibility, especially if Dreamwidth was involved??

I have been chatting to Liz Ellcessor who is writing a book about web accessibility specifically and wants to know about Dreamwidth's accessibility from the inside, but it's also just a thing I have been wondering about more generally too. Dreamwidth is known for "doing accessibility" well and part of that is that we have got a bunch of people fired up about it and that's a really hard thing to do!!

So how do you think you caught accessibility?

Comments

[carene_waterman]

I still have a style=mine bookmarklet on my toolbar.

A long time ago, I started posting on LJ. I knew nothing about HTML, had only ever used forum sites, so I started reading up on how to format posts properly, and I hit the advice about em tags not i tags that everyone likely knows. That's the first exposure to any discussion of webaxe I recall. About the same time, I found that bookmarklet and said bye-bye to journals I couldn't read.

And then DW came along and did things like persistent style=mine, and the navbar that wasn't persistent or responsive (and broke my old narrow monitor display), but actually knew that was a bug, and I realized that I matter. I as a user, my needs and wants matter. DW even has a policy that says I matter.

DW also had a community of folks involved in Feminists with Disabilities or accessibility activism in general and people who talked openly about where they are on the spectrum of all sorts of ability axes all the time.

And then I started learning more about HTML and CSS at a time when the Responsive Design idea was blooming. I never learned any way but fluid and responsive.

And if all device users matter--the ideal behind responsive design--then all users matter. I found the principles of usability in design and that's when the really big click happened for me. Because at the same time I was experiencing growing problems using a lot of websites due to the same gradual loss of visual acuity all sighted people will experience as they age. Then came some recurring tendinitis...

I started reading about usability, responsive design, accessibility, and the more webaxe or a11y folks you read, the more you find. The more it also resonates with anyone who's ever learned any critical feminist or race theory.

And I came to the conclusion that it shouldn't be about people with named disabled identities vs. a normative mass of others, with "catering" to the former considered an enhancement you get to after you deploy.

It should be about how all of us are on a spectrum of abilities and if all of us matter, then all of us should be considered by designers and developers at the wouldn't it be great to make a site that does X stage.

I understand why accessibility gets promoted over usability in order to clearly state goals, prioritize developer time, serve absolute necessities like screen reader users first, get crappy sites to fix things, hell, just to use a word people have a context for. I get that.

But at the end of the day, I still think if you design for usability, for all users, you build in accessibility by default. And it should be by default. It shouldn't be a special add-on you get to after you've lovingly perfected your branded colour scheme and your pixel-perfect layout.

It's like how you can't make your group diverse, you have to make a group that diverse people want to join.

So, the tl;dr is:

* I started doing a bit of very basic coding.
* I stumbled upon some basic accessibility advice.
* I saw DW doing even higher-level accessibility in a matter of fact way.
* I learned more about accessibility in a general theoretical way.
* I was learning more advanced coding.
* My needs changed. Selfishness as the great motivator!!!
* I stumbled upon usability theory.
* My mind linked the chain: social justice - responsive design - accessibility - usability - all users matter - all people matter.

[mundens]

Not that I've done much on Dreamwidth for a while, but I've been pushing accessibility in all my professional web design capacities, since before the original RFC on accessibility came out, purely because I know too many people whom it affects.

Even simple things like careful color choices in design to allow for various forms of colour-blindness, to allowing easy increase of font size for the vision-impaired, are easily forgotten but also easy to do, and can be the difference between a customer buying your product or not.

Also, from a professional standards point of view, the skills and understanding needed to make a web design work properly in, say, a voice-reader, are the same skills and understanding required to make it work in any other form of "non-standard" interface, so someone who practices good accessibility technique in web design is likely to also be capable of handling a shift to a different new interface, like ,initially, mobile phones, and then touch sensitive pads, and now, Google Glasses and voice activation.

So while it's a good thing for those that need it, and knowing people who need it is a good enough reason to do it, what really makes me keen about it is that it makes you think about your design working with multiple different types of interface, and thus to structure your code cleanly. Such things are only going to get more important as ubiquitous computing becomes the norm.

[marahmarie]

But at the end of the day, I still think if you design for usability, for all users, you build in accessibility by default.

This, this, this exactly. And I'm probably, to an objective eye, still probably pretty bad at this in some respects. For example, I have a non-responsive layout on my personal DW that I simply refuse to give up. I sometimes forget to use ems or percentages instead of pixels in sizing fonts or certain otherwise expandable design elements, or to remember everything should scale on zoom. My color palettes probably need some contrast work. Point is, not that I know how to do accessibility/usability right all the time, or even notice what all is wrong with how I do things some of the time, but that since I've joined DW I have taken an increasing interest in both topics, so I'm willing to try. I've come to pretty much the same conclusion as you: in most respects, if your design is fully usable, it will also be far more accessible than if it was not. And that's 90% of anyone's coding/design battle for accessibility right there.