https://www.forbes.com/sites/legalnewsline/2017/06/13/first-...
There is opportunity in this as SEO (a 'service' that can be sold) really depends on accessibility. I find people still concerned with 'keyword frequency' and whether they have their H1 tags in the right place when it comes to 'SEO'. Nobody is talking about making the web better for everyone (which includes the customers with no accessibility problems) and that being the central plank of better sales.
A further problem is that web 'design' agencies do not have the sales staff to sell accessibility. The pitch should not be that hard given that the baby boomer generation have all the money and need spectacles to read anything closer than arms-length away.
I also have yet to see anyone offering accessibility audit services where a genuine, registered partially sighted person does the auditing and testing. This could be end to end, i.e. ordering the product and returning it, with all emails checked along the way, complete with physical packaging.
We assume 'we know best' and that we know what a screen-reader user would want rather than reach out to anyone who is practically blind and ask them what they think. Patronising!!!
It's led to a good percentage of the work done here (both in traditional CMS implementations to custom applications) require accessibility not as an after thought, but baked in by default.
Makes it better for everyone, but without a good handle on what it actually means, and ensuring that whatever toolsets you're using (CMS, JS/CSS/backend framework, library etc.) also provide the necessary tooling as well, it can make projects run over time/budget.
Factor that in first, learn the tech/tools, and it doesn't have to be that dramatic. I'm assuming that common accessibility on the web/mobile will be expected nearly everywhere "soon".
I couldn't help to notice the involuntary pun. What you say is sadly true, and it is a sort of cognitive blindness.
I see what you did there
As one example, I can't navigate the network inspector via keyboard in any meaningful way. Firebug used to have this nailed, to the point where you could even enable an accessibility mode (though arguably accessibility mode should have just been the only mode.) And yes, I'd happily file issues for this and half a dozen other things, but at some point I actually have to do my job, and in this case that might mean jumping ship to a browser that seems more accessible.
[0] https://www.marcozehe.de/2016/05/24/the-firefox-developer-to...
However, the network inspector in Firefox opens with Ctrl+Shift+E for me (Ubuntu with Unity).
The HTML inspector is similar. I can pull up a tree of elements, but sometimes I can expand tree levels from the keyboard and sometimes I can't. I've taken to using the context menu to copy an element's inner HTML into a text editor, then inspecting it that way. Often, clicking Inspect Element from the context menu doesn't open the inspector with keyboard focus on the element I'm inspecting, either, which is a massive pain when I'm trying to tell a developer what is needed to make a site accessible. So, IOW, I can't even file actionable bug reports for web apps without putting forth lots of effort to even identify the element that is at fault.
Saying: "I build web applications" means nothing to them, and saying "I create website" makes you look like a wizard doing some black magic.
But saying "my job is to make websites accessible to everyone: we are used to use a screen and a mouse, but what if you are blind or deaf? Those people should not be allowed to go on any website? My role is to make those people able to browse the web, as you and me" give them an example of what kind of problems you actually solve as a web developer.
Who are these people? When people ask what I do I just tell them "I'm a developer; I make websites" and they understand what I do enough to move the conversation forward. Is there other context I'm missing?
In Indonesia, millions of people say that they don't use the Internet - but they do use Facebook - https://qz.com/333313/milliions-of-facebook-users-have-no-id...
For all of us, it's worth stepping out of our bubble to see how other people perceive what we take for granted.
The other 98% of the world.
I don't want to be just negative, so I'd like to suggest an alternative: "I make parts of computer programs, like <names of well-known products that are similar to ones you make>". This will be easily understandable to everyone who knows what computer programs are and also won't be misleading. You could also add "for the internet" somewhere if that part is important.
If you're able to pull it off, that's impressive.
One thing I don't understand here: why is the Accessibility tab not shown by default? Accessibility is something lots of developers don't even know about. I'm sure having the tab visible by default would help greatly in making developers more aware of it.
The article has this to say: "This is because the accessibility engine runs in the background when the accessibility features are turned on. While it’s running, it slows performance and takes up memory; therefore it interferes with the metrics from other panels such as Memory and Performance as well as overall browser performance. For this reason you should keep it turned off when you aren't specifically using it."
This way you can get feedback from experts in the field to refine the interface and features. Once you have a solid viable product, you can show it to the rest of the world and see how well it serves the needs of people less in the know, without frightening them with a half-baked tool.
The fancy JSON thing: if you collapse the “JSON” expander you’ll see another, “Response payload”, which shows it as text. (If JSON is expanded, Response payload may not expand properly; that’s a bug. I haven’t reported it despite knowing about it for a while.)
Firefox has been my primary browser since 0.93, save for a year or so on Chrome when I had to run it from a USB stick and Firefox got just too slow there. Nightly has been my daily driver for most of this decade.
About the full browser hangs - maybe it was my own system, but I usually had Slack and Gmail open. And those tabs already ate a lot of RAM, making FF sluggish. Opening the scripting tab on my own dev site used to make the browser just get stuck. Devtools didn't use to respond either, but clicking on the close button sometimes worked, so I had to hope that I could click on the cross button without triggering the dreaded "This app has stopped responding" dialog.
See this article for suggestions in other better tools and techniques:
https://www.24a11y.com/2017/accessibility-testing-tools-desk...
This is a good first step, I have been using the WAVE accessibility plug in for Firefox to identify missed issues in my first run through of the app.
Luckily, we have an employee with a visual impairment that we can utilize for real world testing of the app.
This really is its own specialty.
