WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

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Re: Accessible Mega Menu and Safari

for

From: Bryan Garaventa
Date: Apr 5, 2016 10:31AM

Thanks, I do understand your points and agree with many of them.

I've been working with clients to build accessible software since 2004, and in totality it does represent millions in time and monetary expense for accomplishing this, and often solutions that were coded that far back have better and more effective equivalents now that can be utilized for better accessibility. This will always be part of the challenge as our technologies evolve and become ever more complex.

It's important to note that the concept of "full accessibility" is literally impossible however, and anybody who requests this or represents that this is possible, is not being realistic. There is no way to provide full accessibility for every technology in combination with every possible disability type in existence. All we can do is raise the bar as high as we can given our current level of advancement to make what we build as accessible to as many people as possible.

We at the W3C are currently working on better general design patterns, but even so, it is impossible to account for all possible combinations and implementations. This is why understanding how these technologies work is so important, because when this level of knowledge is part of the developer's knowledgebase, the same concepts can be more intuitively applied in variable situations and with much less cost in requisite testing cycles.

"In order for the robustness of our spec compliant code to mean anything, I believe that we, our clients and their customers with disabilities must push harder for OS, user agent, and AT engineers to do their own bug checking during development, as well as after release. They need to have more skin in the accessibility game."

I agree, and this goes back to education, since it is impossible to reliably check for bugs when it's not clear what is being checked for and why. This was primarily the same topic I presented at CSUN about a couple of weeks ago regarding ARIA education:
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/printout-using-visual-aria-physically-see-learn-how-works-garaventa

"Frankly, I think what will ultimately be required to move our cause forward by leaps and bounds, as Mike alludes to, are lawsuits that hold the software manufactures accountable for keeping their links strong to support the overall integrity of the chain of accessibility."

Unfortunately this can be a double edged sword, in that if we legislate mandatory accessibility, how do you do so by referencing a technical specification that is still and will always likely be in development, when the act of legislation sets requirements such as these in stone if applied to general law?

We saw this with Section508, the original of which is so obsolete at this point that we as developers cannot use it reliably for any specific guidance to make complex interactive web UIs accessible beyond the most basic markup enhancements.

My point is that ensuring legislation that supports accessibility is definitely a good thing, but it will likely be impossible to make laws that specifically apply to all OS, browser, and AT venders equally because all are not equal and these technologies are and will always be evolving into different entities that will outpace any technically explicit laws that may apply to them.