Web accessibility is part of the job of everyone

• Writing by Rajveer
• On July 31st, 2008 at 3:53 am

I can say that, too many people who are dependent to make a living being a web professional, the term ‘web accessibility’ is just unknown to them. They might have just heard of it (with a big exclamation mark on their faces) only when a client would have initiated for it.

Usually the tendency pursue like this. Front-end coding team is able to get away with pride by writing HTML/CSS code. The programming team is also done when the results just meet the requirement. But did they think about accessibility, NO! I don’t favor that approach completely because they should have taken more care of people who will access the content, especially people with certain disabilities. How we can ignore web accessibility at the same time when we claim to be passionate about the web and say we deliver the best quality?

We often use the word ‘adaptability’

Remember the early days when we use to write simple HTML 1.0 code for designing websites, and then we had to learn how tables work using colspan-rowspan. But still we wanted to make more beautiful websites including beautiful graphics, so we learnt Photoshop. We started working on JavaScript to do some impressive stuff. With no doubt CSS was a bug revolution in web world, so we expertise in that as well. Browser compatibility issues were on since we knew web, and still do so we keep ourselves updated with happenings around us all the time.

Why do we bother about all that, because we make a living from that job. So let me tell you, you must care about accessibility also. Our job is never complete unless we have put efforts to create accessible content. Accessibility is not rocket science. I don’t say it’s easy, but it’s not very much difficult either. If we are HTML experts then we must know that HTML itself was developed keeping accessibility in mind. It provides the complete information to make the content more accessible. To name few, alt attribute for images, title attribute for anchor tags; caption and summary for tables; Most importantly operable, navigable, understandable, semantic and structural markup.

It got to be accessibility, next skill under your belt. If you are in HTML/CSS or JavaScript or usability (even in a small role) then you are already prepared to enlarge your talent. Dive into accessibility!

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3 Responses

1. anand July 31st, 2008 at 10:26 pm

   Visit following sites…

   Checkpoints for Accessibility:
   http://academics.georgiasouthern.edu/accessibility/docs/checkpoints.html

   For color: http://snook.ca/technical/colour_contrast/colour.html

   Color Brightness Formula

   The following is the formula suggested by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to determine the brightness of a color.

   ((Red value X 299) + (Green value X 587) + (Blue value X 114)) / 1000

   Note : The difference between the background brightness, and the foreground brightness should be greater than 125.

   Color Difference Formula

   The following is the formula suggested by the W3C to determine the difference between two colors.

   (maximum (Red value 1, Red value 2) - minimum (Red value 1, Red value 2)) + (maximum (Green value 1, Green value 2) - minimum (Green value 1, Green value 2)) + (maximum (Blue value 1, Blue value 2) - minimum (Blue value 1, Blue value 2))

   Note : The difference between the background color and the foreground color should be greater than 500.

2. Alex August 2nd, 2008 at 12:04 am

   I agree with you typically, but one thing is always stuck out that you use of the word accessibility is being taken as an evil word. When it comes to responsiveness, this word simply does not work very well.

   I believe in using a trick to talk about accessibility without using the word itself, a word like following best practices. But obviously the whole purpose is to make it accessible for everyone.

3. Inspired Buddy » Switch to alternative zoom layout for low vision users August 24th, 2008 at 8:11 am

   [...] design for low-vision users, which I believe is still not followed by many people since it is an important aspect of web accessibility. We must understand that not every user with visual impairments may use the additional tools for [...]

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