Do you develop with Accessibility in mind?

Question

I've never really learned much about accessibility but it seems like an important topic.

When you build a website or piece of software, or when you're talking to a client about a website, where does accessibility come in? Or from your experience, if you don't have accessibility in something you've built for a client, do you get a lot of requests to include it, or does it limit you in some financial way?

What are the numbers, I guess. What's the return in your business, how many people have you talked to that need it? Do you yourself need accessibility features?

I do mainly Flex/Flash and it seems like I'll have to do a bit of work to have full accessibility.

Thanks for the help.

Answer 1

As a person with a disability myself, I am consious of adding accessibility features when I write software

Accessibility is an area of software design concerned with making software user interfaces avvessibile for people with physical or mental disabilities or imparements. Different people have different specific needs and you can't be expected to cater specifically to each but there are some broad groupings

• Visual Imparements:
  This includes blindness or color blindness. To assist in this area consider providing "good" alt text (clarified blow) and hints so that screen readers can present a view of your content that makes sense aurally. Providing easy access to links to raise text size and/or access to some high contrast stylesheet options is also a good idea.

  • Non-Mouse Users
    There are a huge number of conditions that can prevent one from being able to successfully mouse, it took a few years for me and my brain, which is somewhat unreliable when it comes to spatial relationships to pick up the skill. For these people keyboard access is really helpful, I don't work in the web space so I'm not sure if there are standard keys to use, but these are communicated by screenreaders and tooltips so having any is better than none.

Hanselminutes episode #125 is quite educational. He talks with a blind user about accessibility on the web and in general

Accessibility is omitted from a lot of design processes, either because businesses don't have an immediate need for it and therefore don't consider it at all, or consider it a low priority feature. Leguslation in various countries has helped a bit in this regard, but the real problem is that accessibility in general is usually an afterthaught to the design process,

₁"Good" alt text is judicious use of alt text that accentuates the content or purpose of a page, navigation elements should have alt text describing where interacting with them will take the user, similarly, things that aren't content, like spacers should have no alt text at all, because there is nothinng worse then hearing "Foo's widgets spacer spacer spacer spacer spacer nav_Products spacer nav_support"

Answer 2

I think accessibility is usually completely forgotten about (either implicitly or explicitly dismissed beforehand because of issues like cost) in most software development projects. Unless companies (or individual developers, more likely) already have experience with either people with disabilities or with writing software with disabilities of users in mind.

As a developer I at least try to do keyboard shortcuts correctly in software I work on (because that's something I can easily dog-food myself, since I try to keep hands-on-keyboard as much as possible). Apart from that it depends on whether there are requirements about accessibility.

I do think this kind of thing is part of "programming taxes", i.e. things that you as a developer should always be doing, but...

I am only aware of this - at least more than the average developer, I think - because I have once written software for a software magazine on floppy disk, or Flagazine. This was in PowerBasic 3.2, grown out of BASIC sources in a magazine, making these sources available by BBS and disk, eventually growing a menu around the little applications to easily start them, etc.

One of our primary users (and later members of the editorial staff) was blind and was appalled when we switched from text mode to an EGA mouse driven menu, as his TSR screenreader software couldn't do anything with graphics. It turned out that his speech synthesizer simply accepted text from a COM port. It had a small (8K I think?) buffer that would be instantly cleared on reception of (I think) an ASCII 1 character. And that was it.

So we made the graphical menu (and most other programs on the Flagazine) completely keyboard accessable at all times and in the graphical programs we use a small library I wrote to send ASCII text to a configured COM port. This had small utility methods like ClearBuffer(). With this, and the convention of speaking possible menu actions when pressing the space bar, made all of this software accessable to our blind users.

I even adapted a terminal application for my HP48 calculator (adding a clear buffer/screen on ASCII 1) so I could use that to emulate a speech synthesizer. I would then test all of our software in each Flagazine by attaching my HP48 with the emulator running, turning off my computer monitor and trying if I could use all the software without seeing anything.

Those were the days, about 12 years ago... ;-)

Answer 3

I am a blind individual so have to develop with accessibility in mind if I want to use my own programs. I find my self focusing on accessibility based on the type of application I’m writing. When doing command line or mainframe applications I don’t think about accessibility since those environments are inherently accessible. With web based applications I have to give some thought to accessibility but not a lot. This is mainly because I write simple web applications for limited use so don’t have to worry about making the interface appealing, just usable. The area I spend the most time focused on accessibility is desktop applications. For example using .net I need to make sure accessible properties are set properly and that labels are in the proper position in relation to a text box so my screen reader can find them and associate them with the proper control.