>I'm really sad to see so many people on HN arguing against the need for enforceable (and not onerous if you look into it) accessibility standards on the web.
Someone decided that developers must comply with disability technologies, and not have disability technologies built around the existing technologies. And most developers had no argument in that battle. Now we have aria attributes sitting inside of our HTML.
And most likely because businesses are going to push this down on their existing developers, meaning they will need to devote time and energy learning what ADA and the WCAG standards are and figure out accessibility testing while maintaining all of their previous responsibilities.
But really, we shouldn't need to do any of that.
We should have tools that allow us to comply to these standards with little effort. We should have tools for the disabled that are as brilliant as Google search. We should have testing frameworks that test our websites for this.
Why the hell are we spending money on suing companies instead of spending it on research for curing disabilities? Where's my damn artificial eyes and ears I was promised decades ago? All I got was this stupid lawsuit.
Is any of that being built for the next generations of developers who probably get no accessibility training in college or dev bootcamps or internet tutorials? Do businesses even send their devs to accessibility coding conferences or workshops?
So I think many devs are justified at arguing against having to learn yet-another-spec because someone else simply told them to. We already have enough to learn with companies cramming laundry lists of technologies and ideologies into their job postings. Accessibility will become another bullet point on that list and we'll have Full Stack Javascript Accessibility Ninjas.
Sounds like you've got it all figured out! Let me know when your unicorn comes out of stealth mode.. /s
FYI we do have lots of tools and frameworks that make developing for accessibility relatively straightforward.. But you have to want to do it, and you have to know how to do it. This takes education and learning, but most worthwhile things do.
Sayings things like "businesses are going to push it down on their existing developers" is looking at this all wrong.
Developers should be building accessible websites in the first place.
>Developers should be building accessible websites in the first place.
Sorry, we've got like ten other people telling us we need to "build websites with <this> in first place". Accessibility is just another line item at the same point as security, scalability, and resilience.
And for what it's worth, I would prioritize security over accessibility any day of the week.
It's very easy of you to ask all developers to design websites with accessibility in mind. To push all of these requirements onto someone else.
But keep piling on responsibility onto your devs and watch how they build everything in mediocrity because you don't give them time to become good at anything.
Very often, if not almost always, there is no competition between security and accessibility. I'm not sure how you get this impression. The two can also go hand in hand, building features that render server-side with security in mind in addition to the existing client-side functionality.
FYI I'm not sure what you've assumed about me, but I am a developer, and I treat accessibility just as seriously as all the other must-have requirements, and my team makes it work on budget and on time.
Just because you need to build an accessible website doesn't mean it can't be secure and scalable too.
I'm not sure where you've layered in all these constraints I never brought up (perhaps projecting from your own situation?) but it goes without saying that all aspects of a project need to be properly scoped and planned and given the correct amount of time to be built, and need to be done by people who know what they're doing.
If you just see accessibility as "yet another thing I need to do that I don't have time for", then maybe you just need a better job?
Someone decided that developers must comply with disability technologies, and not have disability technologies built around the existing technologies. And most developers had no argument in that battle. Now we have aria attributes sitting inside of our HTML.
And most likely because businesses are going to push this down on their existing developers, meaning they will need to devote time and energy learning what ADA and the WCAG standards are and figure out accessibility testing while maintaining all of their previous responsibilities.
But really, we shouldn't need to do any of that.
We should have tools that allow us to comply to these standards with little effort. We should have tools for the disabled that are as brilliant as Google search. We should have testing frameworks that test our websites for this.
Why the hell are we spending money on suing companies instead of spending it on research for curing disabilities? Where's my damn artificial eyes and ears I was promised decades ago? All I got was this stupid lawsuit.
Is any of that being built for the next generations of developers who probably get no accessibility training in college or dev bootcamps or internet tutorials? Do businesses even send their devs to accessibility coding conferences or workshops?
So I think many devs are justified at arguing against having to learn yet-another-spec because someone else simply told them to. We already have enough to learn with companies cramming laundry lists of technologies and ideologies into their job postings. Accessibility will become another bullet point on that list and we'll have Full Stack Javascript Accessibility Ninjas.