This course has been updated! We now recommend you take the Website Accessibility, v2 course.
Transcript from the "Accessibility Q&A Round 2" Lesson
[00:00:00]
>> Speaker 1: I have one other question, which is, for a lot of the people that are in the room here, many of them are new to accessibility. Beyond today's class, do you have any recommendations about how to kind of attack going, where to start next, or what to do next?
[00:00:14]
>> Jon Kuperman: Yeah.
>> Speaker 1: Do you focus on an area, or do you focus on semantics, or do you focus on?.
>> Jon Kuperman: Yeah, sure, I mean, I think one of the ways that's been most helpful for me is to take an audit first approach. So audit your projects, which will give you exposure to a lot of different things.
[00:00:30] So as opposed to buying a book, or going to the SPEC, and trying to consume the whole thing, hit all the things that are applicable to you. So I think that's been great, because it really has exposed me to a breadth of different things. Other than that though, I think that there's a couple of things, like using a screen reader has also been great.
[00:00:51] Get on the screen reader, and again, that'll expose you to so many, cuz you'll have to figure it out. You'll be like, why can't I hear this item, or whatever, and that'll help you, I don't know, I guess take a more deliberate approach without trying to accomplish all of it.
[00:01:08] And then other than that, I love WebAIM. I feel like they've really, if you just read the WebAIM checklist a couple times over, cuz it's short, I think that gets you pretty far. Not maybe enough to be accessibility lead at a company that could be facing lawsuits, but definitely enough to get your company, or get your product working really great with assistive technology.
[00:01:27] So I guess one of those, either audit first or screen reader first would be my recommendations, yeah?
>> Speaker 3: Okay, Ben, another one is accessibility seems to almost always include, improve general usability. But if I'm trying to something broadly usable and accessible, are there specific conflicts or trade offs I should expect to encounter?
[00:01:50]
>> Jon Kuperman: I'm kinda trying to think of any use case where an accessibility fix makes usability worse, and I can't think of any. I mean, what it really boils down to, using the best HTML, and the best approaches, and the best, do you know what I mean? Providing, if anything, an abundance of information about your items.
[00:02:10] I feel like I don't think there's a trade-off. I really think the more you do for accessibility, the only effect it can have on usability is a positive one. Yeah, I'm struggling to think of any time where I've had to. I guess there's a few things with designers, like we talked about the links can't be only separated by color.
[00:02:31] But most designers really like that. And the same with focus controls. A lot of designers don't like the focus to change the visual state. So I guess that's a tradeoff, if you're really trying to do accessibility stuff, and the design team feels very strongly about a UI fix that's not accessible, that can be a little bit tough.
[00:02:52] There's usually a pretty happy middle grounds though.