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Re: Remediation Cost Versus Inclusive Design Cost

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From: Bryan Garaventa
Date: Sep 13, 2017 11:10AM

Actually at the time I was just grateful that somebody was willing to help out like this, so I didn't really consider the process, since I had never done it before, there actually was no process. We basically worked out a game plan and I followed her lead in whatever she wanted to work on first and we moved on from there. Since then she has moved onto other projects, but you are welcome to contact her to ask about her experience, her personal website is here http://gericci.me/

Probably the most useful thing that I discovered during the process, was that there is a significant difference between the concept of functional accessibility versus visual accessibility. Visual accessibility being what people expect to happen based on visual information and how this relates to the underlying code. People often confuse these things and incorrectly believe they are the same thing.

Functional accessibility is totally unrelated to the visual aspect, and is only tied to it loosely in some cases where the two are intrinsinctly bound together. E.G Such as when visual components only appear when focus is set on a particular component like in the case of an auto suggest combobox, etc.

So in most cases at the basic level when styling is not required, functional accessibility works correctly for both screen reader and keyboard only users without a screen reader even when there is no styling applied at all, essentially creating a blank canvas for visual designers to do anything they wish to it using CSS without negatively affecting the accessibility of the widget for either of these user groups. There are of course somethings that CSS will do if misapplied that will introduce issues, but I found that these are easily tested for and corrected during the process of development because it's just a matter of tweaking the code within the style sheet or making slight updates to the widget functionality in some rare cases to achieve a particular affect. Typically this takes very little time and effort to achieve.

So the best starting point is to first achieve full functional accessibility, then apply visual styling later to cover varying circumstances if you don't want to have to keep recreating the same wheels for every differing product. Often the only thing that is different is what it looks like, the basic underlying functionality typically remains consistent.

Bryan Garaventa
Accessibility Fellow
Level Access, Inc.
<EMAIL REMOVED>
415.624.2709 (o)
www.LevelAccess.com