I just finished an accessibility audit for a client and I decided to share some quick checks I perform in every site I audit and build. It’s something that you can apply to your project right away, you don’t have to learn a tool or a software.
I don’t consider myself a web accessibility expert but I’ve learned enough in a relatively short time to feel comfortable enough to share my knowledge in blog posts, workshops and talks.
Here’s some advice, if you want to share stuff but are wary about doing it.
It’s always nice to see when people post their Lighthouse scores on social media to highlight how well they’ve optimised their own or their client's website. It shows that they care about the quality of what they build.
CSS Grid layout is powerful and flexible. It's great for our development experience, but it may come at the cost of user experience and accessibility if we don’t use it responsibly.
This article series gives you an overview of potential implementation pitfalls; or, in other words, the dark side of the grid.
If you want to improve the accessibility of your React apps but you don't know how or where to start, this talk is just what you need. Manuel shares 12 tips that will help you build web sites and applications that can be used by anyone. Each tip fits on one slide and you'll be able to put them into practice right away without having to learn anything fundamentally new. The tips include testing, HTML, JS techniques, and general best practices.
I'm a huge fan of CodePen (No, they didn’t pay me to write this). I'm using it for prototyping, experimenting, sharing code, and in my latest blog post, The Dark Side of the Grid, I'm also making use of their Embedded Pens.
CodePen allows you to customize syntax highlighting, and background and text colors of UI elements in Embedded Pens.
As a PRO user, I can also add custom CSS, which gives me the ability to improve Pens not just visually but in terms of accessibility.
CSS Grid Layout is one of the most exciting recent CSS specifications because of its flexibility, extent, and power. It makes our lives so much easier but it also creates new dangers regarding user experience and accessibility.
Of course, it's not my first website but the first one in a long time. My very first personal site went online about 17 years ago. It was a table-based layout with no CSS at all. All styling happened by adding HTML attributes.
Last year I attended JS Conf Budapest and I watched many great talks but “YES! Your site can (and should) be accessible” by Laura Carvajal was the most thought-provoking talk for me. Laura explained how the Financial Times made accessibility a core part of their development process and she shared several lessons she and her team had learned. In her third lesson Throw away your mouse, Laura mentioned that just testing with the keyboard wasn’t enough and that only going keyboard-only all the time made a difference.