While doing a bit of after work stumbling, I came across an article about 5 underused HTML elements. The list was spot on. I dont recall ever using many of these. What really caught my eye about this article was a blurb about web accessibility:
Labels are useful for accessibility and clicking them sets focus to the field.
This made me wonder: Am I doing enough to ensure accessibility to all users on web sites that I am working on? Unfortunately, I do not think I am.
I decided that I should remedy that, and headed over to the w3c to check out the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.
Wow, I had no idea how much goes into this. The quickref is about a mile long. This is going to take some reading.
Luckily for me, someone else has done just that. Spoiler: He is not too happy with the WCAG standards. Here are a couple points I found interesting:
You can’t use offscreen positioning to add labels (e.g., to forms) that only some people, like users of assistive technology, can perceive. Everybody has to see them.
CSS layouts, particularly those with absolutely-positioned elements that are removed from the document flow, may simply be prohibited at the highest level. In fact, source order must match presentation order even at the lowest level.
Several of the sites I am working on use all kinds of faux-modal div’s created with jquery, and none of them render in the same order as they are coded. Applying just these two standards to these sites would take a ridiculous amount of time of meticulously reworking the stylesheets and pages.
There has to be another way. If a web app can be skinned for an iphone with some css changes, it should be possible to do the same for browsers with different accessibility requirements. How about it, science?
