The accessibility divide

This was originally posted on Twitter and added to my journal retrospectively.

Sometimes it feels like the last 10 years of accessibility awareness have fallen on deaf ears.

For every designer/dev that understands the value of universal accessibility, there are 10 who don’t give a crap about it.

Webdev is splitting in two: Those who design/build thoughtful, usable, accessible work and those who want to build “cool shit” at any cost.

I worry that the thoughtful, usable work of long-term value is being drowned out by the short-term excitement of eye-candy and novelty.

Of course, there’s nothing wrong with wanting to do bleeding-edge work. Just don’t go so far to the edge that you fall off.

If there’s to be a future for the universally accessible web, we need to ensure that our stuff works for everyone or as close as possible.

Question everything you add to your site/app. Each feature has potential accessibility issues. Test as much as you can with real people.

Above all, don’t just add stuff because other people are doing it. What they built might look cool but could be riddled with problems.

When we build bloated, inaccessible, scroll-jacky animated abominations, we’re sticking the middle finger up to web accessibility.

In the end, simple, valuable, well crafted and fully accessible sites will be the ones that last. Let’s focus on building those.