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Re: WCAG - Fail or not to - Static text tab-focusable in tables

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From: Mallory
Date: Jan 5, 2021 4:14AM

Hi,

>Your statement "clients who are so awful qua accessibility that even a WCAG audit improves them" applies to every client we have ever had.

Oh, agreed, this is true over here as well. It's just that with the limit of "WCAG-AA-only" their solutions can become "passing but completely unusable". I'd rather do an "accessibility audit based on WCAG" than limit to "WCAG-only", was my point.

> If your clients are organisations who already exceed AA and want to get
> even better, then I would love to know where you find them. In nearly
> 20 years, I have never encountered a client like that.

I have actually but... they were accessibility companies :P I also occasionally get surprised by how well some random company is, but there's indeed usually something that needs fixing.

>However, competently testing an existing badly designed website
> and making the necessary recommendations for changes *is* rocket
> surgery.

Making good, best-practice-based and ultimately usable-by-real-people recommendations, yes. I think that's where skilled a11y practitioners shine.
For the thing I'm calling limited-to-WCAG-AA, recommendations are often pre-written one-liners. Failing 2.1.1? Recommendation: ensure controls are operable with the keyboard, or similar. For someone who merely wants compliance, that's what they're looking for. More than once my long-winded HTML 101 recommendations were not appreciated ("too difficult for the developers" etc). Also, I'm simply windy :P Different clients are expecting different things. I'd rather work for the ones who want to
1. actually be fairly accessible (not merely have a cert)
2. are willing to learn (or have a dev team that learns) the techniques for doing so.

cheers,
_mallory

On Mon, Jan 4, 2021, at 10:15 AM, Steve Green wrote:
> Mallory, it sounds like your experience of the accessibility market is
> entirely different from mine. Your statement "clients who are so awful
> qua accessibility that even a WCAG audit improves them" applies to
> every client we have ever had.
>
> We have worked for many hundreds of clients and not one of them was
> anywhere near WCAG AA conformant when they first came to us. In most
> cases, merely achieving AA conformance was extraordinarily difficult
> and very few actually got there even after many rounds of fixing and
> retesting - there are almost always some things that can't be fixed.
>
> If your clients are organisations who already exceed AA and want to get
> even better, then I would love to know where you find them. In nearly
> 20 years, I have never encountered a client like that.
>
> I would also add a qualifier to your final statement. Developing a WCAG
> AA-conformant website is not rocket surgery if you know what you are
> doing. However, competently testing an existing badly designed website
> and making the necessary recommendations for changes *is* rocket
> surgery. Anyone can do it badly, but it's insanely difficult to do
> well, given the appalling state of most of the websites we are asked to
> work on. The really scary thing is that despite being appalling, most
> of them are better than those that are doing nothing about
> accessibility.
>
> Steve