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

[shadowspar]

When I shipped off to university as an undergraduate, money was pretty tight. We had a slow computer, a slow internet connection, and when it came to allocating what cash we had, upgrading either one never made it to the top of the priority list.

By the time Netscape 4 was released, the wait to render web pages on our machine seemed interminable. I'd heard of Lynx, decided to give it a try, and was immediately blown away by how OMFG FAST the web suddenly seemed -- even with our tired old computer and dodgy internet connection. Too, there was always a huge lineup for the Win95 computer labs at school, but the ones with terminals wired up to the school's Unix server were always empty.

This was a great setup on the whole, but some websites were godawfully, horribly broken. I learned about HTML and its idea of marking up the structure of a document, not its presentation -- the final call on how something is presented should be up to the client. It pissed me off to no end that certain sites wouldn't work on certain devices. There was no reason at all that a website should be totally unusable with a given browser, or a given mobile device, or what have you. And learning that these same interoperability issues were the ones that usually screwed over people who relied on accessibility software -- I mean, I could usually work around the brokenness of somebody's clueless website design, but for a lot of people, that wasn't an available option.

The web should be an accessibility paradise, because if text documents are put together in an interoperable way, a user's client can transform them in whatever way they need to access it. At the time, so many of the people who built websites seemed only to care about whatever "looked cool" on the bigscreen monitors connected to their high-end broadband-fed Windows machines. I remember scornful responses when someone raised concerns about compatibility or accessibility. The ignorance of this very élite group of people was causing folks not to be able to access the information that they needed to go about their lives. That pretty much sealed the deal for me.