Making a website accessible is challenging and requires a big effort from the whole team including developers and designers. Ideally, accessibility should be considered already at the very early stages of a project instead of trying to “fix” it afterwards when in fact it’s already too late.
Accessibility is not a simple binary feature of a website either. You can’t say that one website is accessible and another one is not. It’s actually all about how well and easily accessible the website is.
Creating accessible websites may sound like a straightforward engineering task, but it requires a lot of attention to details and knowledge about how the web works and how different users browse the web. However accessibility is not rocket science, if you take it into consideration all the way from the very beginning of the project including the design and concepting phase of the project.
Additionally, you can get quite far by using semantic HTML and native input elements (don’t forget labels!). They are mostly designed to be accessible to everyone. However, this blog post is not about how to create an accessible website.
Accessibility Is Never Done
You should never think that you are done with accessibility. Saying your site is accessible and you are done with accessibility is like saying that cutting the grass is done. It will soon need to be cut again.
Photo by Jonas Weckschmied on Unsplash
There will always be some parts of the project that could still be improved, some technologies might evolve and the conventions and guidelines may change over time. The dependencies of your project may introduce new bugs and accessibility violations and you yourself or anyone else on the team may accidentally make the accessibility worse. Projects are evolving over time and you should keep a close eye on accessibility in order to not make it worse.
The same goes for web performance. In this sense, web accessibility and web performance go quite nicely hand-in-hand. Making a website perform well and fast means it becomes more accessible to people on low-end devices or slow networks either temporarily or permanently. Similarly to accessibility, web performance should also be monitored and improved over time in order to not make it worse.
Automating Is Not a Silver Bullet
So, if web accessibility and performance are important and you should be keeping an eye on them over time, surely there is a way to automate everything, right?
However, there is only so much you can do with automation and automatic testing for accessibility violations. Some of the issues can only be solved by manually testing and sometimes only by interviewing your end users that use your service and have some disabilities.
Learn More
If you want to read more about automatic accessibility testing and its limitations, read this blog post by my colleague, Eevis on dev.to: Automated Accessibility Testing Is a Good Start - But You Need To Test Manually Too