WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

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Re: Front End Developers and ATs

for

From: Bryan Garaventa
Date: Aug 28, 2013 5:55PM

That's an awesome idea, and one I'd recommend for all engineering students
as well.

If you cover JAWS in IE, NVDA in Firefox, and VO in iOS touch screen
devices, you will hit the majority of the market.

Secondarily is VO on the Mac, and TalkBack on the Android, but support for
complex dynamic behaviors won't be as well supported there, so it's good to
keep that in mind.


----- Original Message -----
From: "David Ashleydale" < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
To: "WebAIM Discussion List" < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
Sent: Wednesday, August 28, 2013 4:28 PM
Subject: [WebAIM] Front End Developers and ATs


> Hi,
>
> I started out my current job as a front-end developer (FED), but later
> branched out into managing an accessibility program. But I remember that
> when I was a developer, I used to keep a copy of JAWS on a computer nearby
> for testing. To me, even if I were following HTML standards, I never
> really
> felt *confident* that what I was coding would work well for a screen
> reader
> user unless I tried it out myself. JAWS was one of my developer tools.
>
> It was very similar to browser testing. If I was told that I had to
> support
> IE, Firefox, Chrome, or whatever, I can't imagine not trying the page out
> in the browsers I was supporting. Even if I knew I was coding to standard
> and I had done it a million times before, I would still want to try it out
> when I was done.
>
> I'm thinking of recommending that all FEDs at the company I work at
> acquire
> and learn how to use an AT or two as part of their development toolkit.
> I'd
> love to hear this group's thoughts on whether or not that seems
> impractical
> or perhaps even unnecessary. Or is this something that all FEDs should be
> doing as part of their job?
>
> Of course, my follow up question is: Which ATs would form a good
> (cost-effective) development toolkit?
>
> Thanks!
> David
> > >