Hi

Accessibility on the web

Accessibility on the web

I have no idea what I’m doing

Facts

• Over 285,000,000 people suffer visual impairment.
• 90% of the world’s visually impaired live in developing countries.
• 80% of all visual impairment can be avoided or cured by conventional means.

Three levels of
visual impairment

• Moderate visual impairment
• Severe visual impairment
• Blindness

Color blindness is
very common

Some form of color blindness affects at least one in 20 people.

Simple solutions

• Use larger fonts.
• Don’t rely on color alone to communicate.
• Use real text instead of text-based images.

Demo

Dialogs in Harvest with a screen reader

ARIA

Accessible Rich Internet Applications

Spec created to improve accessibility of web sites by providing extra information to screen readers via HTML attributes.

Native HTML semantics should still be used whenever possible, but ARIA is useful when certain design patterns or interactions make it impossible to do so.

It’s been a challenge

• There are a lot of roles and values for ARIA attributes.
• The spec is open to some interpretation as to how to implement.
• Solutions vary from source to source.

Tools

Some are really good and some are meh.

• Cmd F5 turns on MacOS ScreenReader - this will give you a headache after about a minute.
• There are some linting tools that integrate with the development workflow - Command line, CI, and bookmarklets.

The end… I guess?

• I’m interested in this problem.
• I’m continuing to research and learn best practices.
• I’ll continue to improve the accessibility of Harvest.