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Web accessibility is not hard to learn

  • Writing by Rajveer
  • On February 11th, 2008 at 11:11 am

I love accessibility and I believe it is not hard to learn at all. It may takes some time to learn, just as usual time as you require to learn any other new thing in this world. Most importantly what really matters is to keep the word Accessibility in your mind all the time while you are working. You can find lot of documentation and guidelines including web standards which I myself find hard to follow every time. But it’s worth to give a read to that in depth and let your brain do some exercise.

My work is designing and developing websites, I have been doing this from past more than 5 years. On behalf of my experience I can make a statement that many designers/developers still miss the basics, like using alt and link attributes, choosing right color theme, text alternatives to scripts and to ignore the excessive use of unwanted disturbing widget/plug-in.

I usually ask many other web developers/designers, their opinion about accessibility as in terms of their daily job role and responsibility. I can imagine that most of them simply don’t know about it yet. Here’s what I get in answers:

  • Being a designer, I know what sort of colors I should use in a website. But in some controversial cases I don’t want to jump into any arguments with my client to convince him about what colors he should ignore for his website to keep it accessible for disable users. I just end up doing my job just the way he wants, that’s it.
  • I am just a developer and I think some one else need to work on the accessibility part.
  • Web accessibility is not hard to work on, I know something about it. But I am just a tiny part of this project I can’t take care of whole website to make sure the accessibility part is taken care very well.
  • I don’t think we have enough time to spend on accessibility, I am not even sure if client himself even mentioned that.

Well that all make sense for an excuse from an individual (may be), but off course not for accessibility terms. I believe what all of us (client, service provider, web designer, web developer, testers) need is a general awareness so that every individual join together which makes team who loves accessibility. Web accessibility is certainly not hard to learn and implement. It just requires attention to detail, concern, and understanding. If we understand the importance of it, we will not accept any compromise with it.

7 Responses

  1. Harsha February 13th, 2008 at 3:38 am

    I very much agree the way you have highlighted the sense of understanding the Accessibility. Infact I also wonder why STILL pople are not very much serious about it.

    Hope these these types of articles may help the unaware guys and help making Web access for more people.

  2. admin February 13th, 2008 at 6:07 am

    Thanks Harsha!

  3. Andy June 30th, 2008 at 10:18 pm

    Nicely said..

    Why don’t you make a presentation for Accessibility also like the one you did for tableless layout :-D

  4. Yash July 30th, 2008 at 12:40 am

    Where am I learn web accessbility?

  5. Rajveer July 30th, 2008 at 8:41 pm

    Yash – I have sent an e-mail to you with some great resources to start with accessibility. Thanks!

  6. Yash July 31st, 2008 at 8:37 pm

    Thanks Rajveer

  7. Inspired Buddy » Switch to alternative zoom layout for low vision users August 24th, 2008 at 8:12 am

    [...] my to-do list since I started this blog. Finally it is functional, “>. As I have been saying accessibility is not hard to learn, this one too is just an additional step to dive into it. We can implement the zoom layout [...]

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