WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

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Re: Whether or not to disable formsubmitbutton

for

From: jp Jamous
Date: Dec 18, 2023 7:50AM

Good point Tim. I am an old school developer. I was coding with VB 6 in college and dove into the .NET when it came out. That tells you how old I am. LOL

The professor that taught me programming came from the punch card days. He taught me old skills and tricks that I still use until today. I am so grateful to have met Ron.

With the above in mind, I refuse to use ARIA unless there is no HTML approach to the problem. Sure HTML is loose and browsers are forgiving now, but that does not mean we should go with the flow and get sloppy with our markup. In fact, many programming languages are following Apple's approach with Swift. Only retrieve from a class what you want and not the whole class as Object Oriented Programming has always done. That allows efficient programming, faster execution and more information can be loaded in the memory of a device without bogging it down.

Users not only want accessibility but productivity as well. I have witnessed so many developers inject ARIA all over, because it is in their minds now that ARIA is for people with disabilities. The same concept as screen readers are the only assistive technologies to worry about. Both of those are wrong. In fact, it is our duty as Accessibility Professionals to educate developers to lead them down the right path.

I am not stating that my approach is the best. Every situation is different. For example, if a business wants an accessible sight, but time is money, they might use ARIA to expedite their sprints. It might be feasible for them to do that then to lose money on each sprint. They can purchase additional resources on their cloud-based web servers and put the load on that side rather than on the client side.

What I am claiming is that we still need to teach proper markup, efficient execution and best user experiences. Those 3 are a part of the user interface and accessibility is all about the user interface. A good example is the reason why Twitter came out with Bootstrap in the early 2000 for mobile devices and why Facebook came out with React for mobile browsers as well. The interesting part is that React is still the hottest web development framework and Bootstrap is still a major part of all of Visual Studio's web templates. That fact says quite a bit about efficient execution.