It must really suck, and when I work on small(but large) personal projects I feel bad that someone might not be able to use it. What are some good resources to start thinking accessibility first? I remember in the past it was .. a project and a half in and of itself.
The nice thing is it's very easy to get started, and no matter what you're working on, be it a web project, a mobile app, or even something for desktop there are loads of resources out there, as well as people who care.
For web stuff, over the last month or so I've been pointing people to the relatively new but still pretty nice A11y Style Guide[0]
This is obviously for just getting started. When we get into more complicated markup, I often find fantastic resources, articles, and examples from companies like SSB BART or Deque (no affiliation with either)
When mobile accessibility comes up, few people do it better than the BBC, and they have a great resource on it[1]
I'm also working on a playbook for mobile accessibility, but that's still under development.
The really important and kind of awesome thing is that it's extremely easier to test the accessibility of whatever you're building as you build it. Unlike the bad old days where screen readers costs $1,000 and no developers had access to them, on mobile or Mac screen readers are built directly into your device, and on Windows NVDA is completely free from [2]
Hope this gives you a starting point, and if you have more questions feel free to reach out, email in profile.
I guess something I have trouble wrapping my head around is when is it acceptable to give up on a11y? I mean, it seems improbable to get a11y into an expansive CLI application. Or a 3D game. When does it become OK to give up?
> it seems improbable to get a11y into an expansive CLI application
Why?
I used to use make menuconfig back in 2000--why should it not work now?
3d game? This I'll grant you. Some experiences are just not replicatable for the blind, though if you're interested in this at all check out the weird and wonderful world of audiogames and 3d audio with HRTF.
An editor? Even a visual editor? Is not one of these experiences. I used to use Visual Basic 6 just fine, dragging and dropping controls out of the toolbox, lining things up, and editing the code behind the widgets all the way back in 2002.
I see that this project apparently took 8 years by 150 people, according to the OP. With this much human effort behind it, it's remarkable that no one once said, hey, I wonder if anybody with a visual disability might want to use the app that this will be a part of?
I don't really understand your question. Mark what up, a command line interface? They don't really have markup.
If I'm trying to read a lot of data in a CLI, the output of top, for instance, I need to read by line with the screen reader fixed to a given column offset but it works fine even if it's a little awkward.
I guess I meant that in the case of HTML you usually mark things up with aria tags and what have you. Not that there was anything like that in CLI land.
How would you mark it up? If I have multiple panes with different data, and say a graph, how does a screen reader know that? As far as I know that kind of data can't be conveyed yet?
This is only one small facet of the problem, but a11y[0] is a helpful tool to automate accessibility testing. It of course doesn't cover everything you should be concerned about, but as someone who's far from an expert, it feels like a good starting point.
