Where's the fun in accessibility? (opens in new tab)

It's good that the author is questioning how to make accessible content in ways that make the experience of using a site better for everyone, but it's incredibly disappointing that they scattered the article with points saying (I'm paraphrasing) "I'm not visually impaired so I can't know what this is like!"

You can know. Just talk to people who use assistive tech. Don't guess at how to improve what you build. Hire a diverse team who know these problems because they encounter them. Hire consultants. Just reach out to your friends to find someone who'll spare an hour of their time in return for a coffee - I guarantee that they'll be amazed and so damn happy that you want to make your code work better for them.

Also, and this is critical for understanding why accessible software is worth building, you should also realise that making something accessible makes it better for everyone. Accessibility features like enabling keyboard navigation of an app improves the user experience for everyone who chooses to use that feature, not just for people who need that feature. I believe that if you think of adding accessible feature as "enabling powerusers" you stop finding excuses not to bother.

> We’ve been taught that UX is not only about function, but about delight, whimsy, wit, and beauty.

Is this real? If this is really the case, it would explain why my observations of UX feel delightfully negative. There's too much focus on themselves and not on the user.

For the first example - the Agency homepage with the playful mouse pointer interaction - I managed to get this working with a keyboard-controlled pointer. Controlling mouse via keyboard is a standard accessibility feature in both MacOS[1] and Windows[2].

I've never investigated this functionality before - which is shameful, as my main side project is a JS library targeted at making the HTML canvas element more accessible to users (like the author, I have no need for accessibility enhancements in my daily work or life). So I popped over to my library's test/demo page and followed the instructions for invoking pointer move/press/release/etc actions via the keyboard. From my brief investigation, the actions seem to work as expected in those demos that test/use pointer hover/click interactions.[3]

Reports of shortcomings in my library, when it comes to accessibility issues, are always very welcome!

[1] - Control the mouse pointer using the keyboard in MacOS https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/mac-help/mh27469/mac

[2] - Control the mouse pointer using the keyboard in Windows https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/use-mouse-keys-t...

[3] - Scrawl-canvas testing and demo page - https://scrawl-v8.rikweb.org.uk/demonstrations

If your website is commercial in nature then it can help to get rid of the buzzwords such as 'SEO' and 'accessibility' to just think of putting the customer first.

In a real retail business, what would you do for customers that needed some type of assistance, whether reading labels or navigating the store? Hopefully you would help them out as needed with a customer first ethos and not treat them as 'disabled'. If anything, their money is going to be yours quicker than with those 'able bodied' customers because you have gone out of your way to help them.

Chipping away at the 'accessibility' of a website, there is a long way to go before getting the 'aria' properties right on every link. Text might be below the size Google deems 'accessible'. Making that text big and chunky might upset designers who want the customer to be browsing by pictures not words. If you argue the case from an accessibility viewpoint they are imagining wheelchairs and they don't see their customers that way. However, if you can argue 'putting customers first' floats their boat. "Won't have text too small for Google" and "so the typical customer can read the text" is still about accessibility but you are not using the 'a' word.

For me the fun in accessibility is this word play, to persuade a wider team that has its own inertia and SEO religion to 'put the customer first'.

The author's missing the fundamental tradeoff here. "Alt text is notoriously difficult to get right and heavily dependent on context" precisely because alt text is an assistive technology; you can't rely on context-insensitive tools or your intuition as a sighted person who sees the entire website at a glance to understand whether some fun tweak to the alt text will make things harder for those who are relying on it. Unless you have the resources to focus group it, I don't know how you could possibly be confident that adding a touch of whimsy to your accessible design isn't causing problems.

Something I’ve done sometimes is make the alt-text for images humorous, especially when the image is hard to describe. I’ve worried a bit though that screen-reader users might find these longer descriptions annoying

I guess the issue is that visually we can scan a page and and experience many things at once. Also, there are many ways to move the mouse cursor from one position to the next. There is a lot to work with.

I am wondering whether there are similar mechanisms for non-visual, non-mouse contexts. I don't think the solution is to add an endless stream of background noises to our websites. I fear the article is correct when it says:

> This leaves the entire burden of branding on voice & tone alone.

I don't want "fun" in an online banking, government or other service website.

Animations may look like fun, until you're in some slow remote desktop. I don't want to be mesmerized by the way some dots move in response to the pointer; I want to know whether that bill got paid or whatever, or check the status of some application.

Bad accessibility is bad for everyone, not just people who are visually impaired.

I had the opportunity to update an application for a blind person. It's incredibly gratifying to know that after my work, someone who was excluded from using a software can now use it.

But in my experience, accessibility is the 100th bullet point on the to do list and most everyone agree that it's the right place. It's so true that in Europe, there's now a law that force everybody to have accessibility.

I remember when "accessibility" was the buzzword for video game companies to destroy everything challenging and interesting in their games for the crowd who, and I'm phrasing this nicely, needed a much, much lower bar of entry.

Coincidentially that crowd also has looser wallets.

Seems like the author is also the submitter. Shouldn’t it then be prefixed with “Show HN”?

Oh look, a designer talking about accessibility... while using (on mobile at least) a lightweight, grey font for pull quotes, thus making it innaccesible for anyone who struggles with low contrast text, or is using a phone outside, or just has a shitty screen. Yes, it's good to be able to share "fun" content with all your users, but you should probably cover the absolute basics first.