Supporting speak text is especially difficult because you have to sequence the texts depending on your layouts.
Oh shit, my app is successful and I didn't think about accessibility
171–180 of 302 posts
Re: Oh shit, my app is successful and I didn't think about accessibility
#172The universal good, and unappreciated reality, about accessibility is that it benefits everyone. Wheelchair ramps aren’t limited to wheelchairs. I have above average hearing despite my advancing age and I choose to apply subtitles to digital movies about half the time because it provides me a better more enriching experience. Solving for color contrast limitations benefits everyone even when people have perfect visio…
As someone who's legally blind, this has always bugged me. It's like the trend of "dark mode", I've always found it easier to see white text on a black background but it seems like a relatively recent trend that it's becoming normal for apps/sites to actually be designed with that in mind.
Also as a slight tangent, public transportation! The US being so car dependant really hinders my independence, and better public transportation would benefit everyone (except car manufacturers, I suppose)
Re: Oh shit, my app is successful and I didn't think about accessibility
#173The universal good, and unappreciated reality, about accessibility is that it benefits everyone. Wheelchair ramps aren’t limited to wheelchairs. I have above average hearing despite my advancing age and I choose to apply subtitles to digital movies about half the time because it provides me a better more enriching experience. Solving for color contrast limitations benefits everyone even when people have perfect visio…
That’s your experience/opinion but it’s a step too far to claim ADA reqs should be applied universally and are an unalloyed good. For instance, some badly needed housing has routinely been denied because it’s too often impossible to make, say, accessory dwelling units wheelchair friendly. These ADA requirements thus limit supply, in turn raising rents, and causing real harm to younger, poorer people who are without affordable homes. Your example about contrast correction reeks of entitlement as well. I am also older, and bought a pair of reading glasses instead of expecting to push the cost onto society as a whole.
Re: Oh shit, my app is successful and I didn't think about accessibility
#174The universal good, and unappreciated reality, about accessibility is that it benefits everyone. Wheelchair ramps aren’t limited to wheelchairs. I have above average hearing despite my advancing age and I choose to apply subtitles to digital movies about half the time because it provides me a better more enriching experience. Solving for color contrast limitations benefits everyone even when people have perfect visio…
It is not universally true that accessibility efforts always benefit everyone. For example, implementing ARIA markup on HTML only benefits those using assistive technology. If developers don't know how to make web services accessible, it IS expensive because it will take time to train them. Developer time is often a company's biggest expense. Moreover, not every web product is simple to make accessible even by expert…
I do think training developers and designers on accessibility is a core part of having them ship professional quality work. Even if product people and designers aren't thinking about it, I think it's reasonable to expect competent front-end developers to understand how to implement designs to some professional standard that doesn't make the page unusable for people with disabilities and expose the company to lawsuits.
On the other hand I don't think the business really knows/cares what HTML you use, they just can reasonably trust people to implement stuff in the "right" way, which 90% of time is identify the correct HTML to represent the nature and structure of the design and build out from there. You'd expect things to "just work" when you are paying for front-end specialists.
Re: Oh shit, my app is successful and I didn't think about accessibility
#175The universal good, and unappreciated reality, about accessibility is that it benefits everyone. Wheelchair ramps aren’t limited to wheelchairs. I have above average hearing despite my advancing age and I choose to apply subtitles to digital movies about half the time because it provides me a better more enriching experience. Solving for color contrast limitations benefits everyone even when people have perfect visio…
It is not universally true that accessibility efforts always benefit everyone. For example, implementing ARIA markup on HTML only benefits those using assistive technology. If developers don't know how to make web services accessible, it IS expensive because it will take time to train them. Developer time is often a company's biggest expense. Moreover, not every web product is simple to make accessible even by expert…
I think the argument is more along the lines of "if you look after the pennies, the pounds look after themselves," not the slight straw man of "every single little accessibility improvement benefits every single user." If you have accessibilty at the heart of what you're doing then it will almost inevitably improve the product for everyone to some extent. My argument would be stronger, in that I think there's a very high probability that it will improve the product significantly for a large proportion of your audience.
Re: Oh shit, my app is successful and I didn't think about accessibility
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
Disability accommodations tend to also strongly benefit everyone else. I know this isn't a code thing, but the most useful one I can think of is curb cuts. All of this affects all of us.
Speaking of curb cuts, recently in my town, they ripped up the sidewalks with already existing curb cuts, and added a new yellow pad with raised bumps in addition to new curbs (with the cuts). I was going to ask what this was for, but a quick search indicates that it is likely for blind users to feel the end of the sidewalk with a cane. https://www.simplemost.com/sidewalk-bumps/?utm_partner=gray_...
Those also have good traction. On a winter morning before anyone gets around to shoveling, those pads might be the only good surfaces on my entire commute. The street corner where cars are turning is a pretty good spot not to be slipping.
Re: Oh shit, my app is successful and I didn't think about accessibility
#177The universal good, and unappreciated reality, about accessibility is that it benefits everyone. Wheelchair ramps aren’t limited to wheelchairs. I have above average hearing despite my advancing age and I choose to apply subtitles to digital movies about half the time because it provides me a better more enriching experience. Solving for color contrast limitations benefits everyone even when people have perfect visio…
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Re: Oh shit, my app is successful and I didn't think about accessibility
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
That’s fair; I might have been a little gung-ho with this introductory flavour text
I think your post has personality, as it is written. Just my unsolicited, non-expert advice: don't make your writing more generic just to appeal to a wider audience.
You won't stop until everybody is reading your blog
Re: Oh shit, my app is successful and I didn't think about accessibility
#179The universal good, and unappreciated reality, about accessibility is that it benefits everyone. Wheelchair ramps aren’t limited to wheelchairs. I have above average hearing despite my advancing age and I choose to apply subtitles to digital movies about half the time because it provides me a better more enriching experience. Solving for color contrast limitations benefits everyone even when people have perfect visio…
> The universal good, and unappreciated reality, about accessibility is that it benefits everyone.
I think there are many cases where it benefits everyone, but probably many more cases where it has no positive OR negative effect for the median user. It doesn't improve the UX in a way that makes a difference to them.
The question in this, as in all things, is whether enough of your users will benefit from accessibility improvements to justify the marginal cost of implementing them versus not implementing them. And, at a more granular level, which improvements can be made to get the most benefit for the least cost.
You could probably more accurately say that accessibility never hurts anyone. But even that might get an objection, because there is a cost to implementing it, compared to working on new features, or polishing old ones.
Re: Oh shit, my app is successful and I didn't think about accessibility
#180I do my best to make all of my apps at least vision-impaired accessible. The last app, I figured a way to make that easier to manage, and reward use by non-disabled folks. I have a long-press help feature. If you long-press on any element in the UI, up pops a popover, with a header, and body text, pointing at the element. The popover explains that element. It's fairly easy to have a long-press gesture recognizer appl…
Say what you want about Apple, they hit the nail on the head when it comes to A11y APIs
Yes, even just using UIKit will take you a decent way for a11y, and if you try to use parameterized fonts and colors where possible, replace image assets with SF Symbols, and fill in accessibility labels it’ll take you into the home stretch.
I’m still not perfect about it but have trying to make a habit to do these things and will periodically test apps I’m working on with e.g. large fonts enabled in Settings, which doubles as a layout robustness test and improves the experience for everybody since it prepares for edge cases that’d otherwise been missed.