In a prevoius project I became aware of the lack of respect in web development for people with disabilities.
I had the experience to come in contact with users that had reduced visual perception. It was an eye opener in many ways, especially as former sinner.
We needed to adopt our product to meet requirements for visually impaired users and it was a huge undertaking on an old product. Even if we fixed all bad markup, the bigger problem was workflow and page composition.
Too many pages had too much information to usable for user with a screen reader. If the screen reader reports 200 links on page, which one to open if all of them do totally different things? Just "reading" all of them takes a very long time and if the context of the link is always changing to different logical tasks.
And often the workflow to get to the correct context involved popups, mouse hovering, drag and drop and other bad design choices. Even for a normal user.
Usually the argument against making pages accessible is as follows,
* adds extra effort
* complicated
* hard to know correct solution
* screws up the design
I would argue that if you think this thru from the beginning and takes into account when doing the design, your general workflow will improve for all users, because you avoid the complicated solutions.
The irony is that myself is visually impaired with mild colorblindness, but I really never thought about it before that project.
Here at HN the login name in the upper right corner is written in green on an orange background. I can't read that. Its just a blur and cause eye irritation.
In my opinion, accessibility should be part of the curriculum in computes science courses.
But even if you do, you need to get developers to enjoy solving this problem. Most developers don't care when you mention it. Maybe because they don't see it as a technical problem.
What do you think?
