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Re: Front End Developers and ATs

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From: Léonie Watson
Date: Aug 29, 2013 1:59AM

David Ashleydale wrote:
"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"

It's a great idea for developers to experience different assistive
technologies. One thing needs to be made very clear to them though: It's not
a good idea to base design decisions only on their experiences, or based on
the behaviours of a specific technology.

It's 101 for people on this list, but I came up against a classic example
recently. A developer who had downloaded Jaws and was using it to explore
the website he was building.

The developer was on the brink of rewriting lots of text content to reduce
the amount of punctuation that was spoken by the screen reader, not
realising that punctuation settings are among the most commonly changed by
Jaws users, or that other screen readers have a less verbose punctuation
setting as default. In doing so he would have altered the grammatical
quality of the content, unintentionally having an impact on other people.

Léonie.