net

PROJECTS
Accessibility

When I started to learn HTML, I began with

basic elements like h1, p, div and button. I

learned about semantics, creating sections with

headings and styling elements with CSS.

Unconsciously, I was laying a foundation of

knowledge on how to build accessible websites.

In 2014 – eight years in as a front-end developer

• I attended a talk by Heydon Pickering in which
  he mentioned accessibility. This is when I realised
  semantics play an important role in accessibility.
  Before that, I’d only written semantic HTML because
  that’s what I’d learned to do. Looking back, I realise
  it shouldn’t have taken eight years before I learned
  about something as important as accessibility.
  In those eight years, I read a lot of articles about
  various web-related topics. I don’t remember
  accessibility being a prominent part of those articles.
  This is something that most certainly has improved
  since then – a lot of articles now explicitly mention
  accessibility. That’s so cool!
  We all play our part in the accessibility of content.
  So we should all have some accessibility knowledge
  that relates to our part of the puzzle. From media

managers that make sure videos have subtitles to

developers that know when to use ARIA and when

not to. This also includes the people in charge

of projects, such as product owners, department

heads and CEOs. These are the people that actually

have the power to make accessibility a project

requirement and establish it as a goal that everyone

has to work towards.

It’s difficult to be the only person who fights for

accessibility. And we shouldn’t have to fight. The

reason that we have to is that our superiors either

don’t know about accessibility or don’t care about

it. If only one person fights for accessibility, it’ll

remain a personal thing – it won’t become a part of

a company’s design process. On top of that, there

are a lot of different aspects to accessibility and you

cannot expect one person to know all the ins and

outs. One specialist per company isn’t enough to

create an accessible product.

Every member of the team should be fully behind

accessibility, the same way that the team should be

fully behind delivering a quality product. After all,

accessibility is a big part of the quality of your site.

ENSHRINING ACCESSIBILIT Y

AT EVERY LEVEL

Michiel Bijl explains why every team should have an accessibility specialist:

one per company isn’t enough

PROFILE

ACCESSIBILITY

Michiel has written for the web since the turn of the century and

is an editor of the W3C WAI-ARIA Authoring Practices.

Follow them @MichielBijl