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Re: State of Accessibility in Dynamic Web Content

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From: JP Jamous
Date: Oct 19, 2018 11:15AM

Almost all of you have provided great feedback on this topic. I just wanted
to share my 2 cents based on my experience with various teams that use all
of those JS frameworks.

1. There is definitely a web design shift taking place here. It is not new.
In fact, it has been occurring slowly but surely and now it has gotten more
attention, as more and more sites started adopting it.
2. Money and time are the driving factor behind those JS frameworks, because
developers can code quickly and push their code out to those various CMS
systems.
3. Let's not just point the finger at others, rather look at what we have
been doing as individuals with disabilities. We are not being reactive
enough. How old is WCAG 2.0? Now after 10 years we realize that we need a
2.1 version? All that time responsive UIs have been out and we were not
paying attention to that. I would really like us to stop and evaluate our
progress versus the progress of companies.
4. While proper HTML semantic is highly important, in my opinion, RAD -
Rapid Application Development has changed that tremendously. If we review
VB.NET, ASP.NET and many other languages, we realize that companies like
Microsoft are providing developers fully customizable components right out
of the box. Drag, drop and code around it. That's how it was and now it is
even worse, Drag, Drop, and Bind together. The IDE writes all the code in
the background. So for the old and new developers, this is time saving and
they love that because they can get the work done in a much shorter time
span.
5. Since time and money are the driven factors behind all projects, who has
the time to learn ARIA? Many developers that I deal with on daily bases tell
me, "ARIA is so hard to comprehend." If I stop and think outside the box I
can relate to what they were saying. ARIA does not work alone and with the
interoperability of JS, HTML, CSS and ARIA coding becomes a nasty process
that is time consuming and time is money.


I am not making excuses or pointing fingers. I am just looking at the market
from a neutral prospective.

If demand is greater than supply, then we would have a shortage of supply.
If products are expensive, consumers will look for alternatives or
substitutes. Those are very basic economic concepts. Unless we think
economically as accessibility experts, we will remain behind the current
languages that are out on the market and causing us to deal with this large
inaccessible JS framework revolution.

As an advocate for people with disabilities, I know first-hand how hard it
is to get laws passed and for change to occur. I also understand that making
the rest of society realize the need to accessibility is hard. I do want to
take a look at assistive technology manufacturers for a moment because they
are a part of this equation too just like browsers are.

Why aren't VFO and NVDA standardizing things? I understand one is for profit
and the other is open source. However, if they truly care, they should
collaborate efforts and work to standardize how screen readers parse HTML
content. VFO will not lose money and go out of business. They just provided
a new feature with JAWS 2019 where it is like Office 365. Pay a $90 a year
and use any version of JAWS. Isn't that better than the $1,000 that they
were imposing on their consumers? Plus, it is consistent steam of income
coming in for them just like Microsoft realized that a service based program
is much better than a one-time fee.

By standardizing things, it would make it much easier for us to push back on
inaccessible markup. I have to always remind developers that we use JAWS/IE,
NVDA/FF and Voiceover/Safari because we cannot test with all the various
combinations. It is time consuming and time is money. We are always back to
this basic fact even as accessibility experts.

While I have diverted a bit from the technical part, it was necessary
because we have to address the economical part first. That is the driving
factor that we keep forgetting. I was in that loop back in 2016, but as of
2017, I started realizing why we are unable to have the accessibility
traction we need. If time is money and that is how the private sector
operates, we cannot focus on our own rules to play the same game.
Accessibility is highly important. Yeah that is a quite important rule, but
that is not the rule that the rest of the world is playing by. So we are
indirectly setting ourselves for failure that way.

Besides the WebAIM survey, I have yet to find strong surveys and usability
studies that can give me solid numbers to take and face business owners with
to help them recognize the importance of accessibility. Most people who are
using assistive technologies or have disabilities do not want to provide
that information. I totally understand their right to privacy, but if that
information can provide the numbers we need then we can have stronger cases
to face both the private and public sector with and achieve our goal.

I just wanted to shed the light on a few things that we are not considering.
We can e-mail back and forth all day until we drop, but nothing will change
if we cannot focus as a unified group on the realistic points that are
causing us to be in the situation we are in now. Until we start addressing
those points in a unified way, we will remain to operate the same way we
have been and accessibility will always remains way behind cutting-edge
technologies.

One last remark. Notice that I used the word "Unified" multiple times. I did
that on purpose because we are individuals with different opinions and we do
disagree about different things. That is fine if we disagree as a group
amongst ourselves. However, we cannot disagree when we are facing the world.
We have to be unified to achieve our goals and objectives.

This is just my 2 cents folks. I do not expect a reply from anyone and you
do not have to agree or disagree with me. I just wanted to voice my opinion
based on my observation with large corporates. If we can start the change at
those large corporates, we can make that replicate down to medium and small
businesses.



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JP Jamous
Senior Digital Accessibility Engineer
E-Mail Me |Join My LinkedIn Network
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