SoTB26: The Plateau of Accessibility Compliance
This is one of my favorite topics. I firmly believe that every developer should observe or participate in a user/usability research session. We spend our days guarding against edge cases. But, when it comes to a user's experience of a website, there will always be things that we cannot anticipate. This talk, presented by Chad Gowler, was an excellent exhortation of the importance of building beyond one's personal experience.
One refrain they said was that the WCAG accessibility guidelines are just the baseline. There is so much more to accessibility than what passes an audit. Truly accessible websites are inclusive. They are built with consideration for the different modes a user can use to interact with it. The example of an industry that has widely incorporated this ethos is gaming, which I did not know. I'm excited to dig into this further when the slides are published.
Notable points:
- "You can create an accessible design system and still have an inaccessible website". Chad mentioned that most design systems don't show how the elements in the context of the full page. Elements are often
- Accessibility is not just meeting a standard, it's considering the context in which the website might be used. The speaker gave an example of a disabled user with mobility disability who was filling out a form that required a passport number to proceed. But, they couldn't reach the passport because it was in a different room out of reach, so they needed to wait for another person to retrieve it.