What has been your experience implementing web accessibility?

Assuming you’re a small team and with a site / product that’s not big yet, can you share why you are thinking to implement accessibility at this stage?

Beyond that tools like WebAIM and Lighthouse help a ton.

Maybe for a Netflix or some other widely used consumer app it is essential because the # of affected users might be significant.

For a 2ish million user SaaS I used to work on, nobody ever cared enough because the chance that someone is going to use a11y features to do their work was extraordinarily rare, in fact probably zero considering the domain. We did enough to cover our bases, maybe 80-90% of the way there, but that’s it.

I mean emotionally I get it. But it’s a business at the end of the day. For a popular consumer app it makes sense to invest the time and effort. For others, it really is not.

1) The more abstract and frameworky the code becomes the more challenging accessibility becomes. Vanilla JavaScript applications have an insanely huge advantage here.

2) Understanding web accessibility is as straightforward as reading the conformance criteria. This remains true for non developers.

3) Developers have one additional step to really understand accessibility: using HTML correctly to describe content.

4) Finally the most challenging part of accessibility from only looking at the code is color contrast and enough space between interactive controls.

But it was supposed to be evolving, at least from a regulatory perspective. The Office of Civil Rights in the DOJ owns enforcement of this, and that team is pretty friendly and reasonable. Or was a few years ago... I haven't talked to them since the current administration came in, so don't what what their current state is. In any case, their plan a couple years ago was to stop making it about checklists and accessibility checkers and work towards a broader goal of "Make the UX as good for people with limits as it is for people without limits." They wanted to get away from, for example, solutions that would meet the letter of the law by making a non-mouse user hit tab 117 times when a mouse user only had to do one click.

So if you are really trying to do accessibility well, that is the perspective to embrace - not "give me a tool that fulfills a checklist", but "Make UX equitable for all."

Perfect accessibility on the web as it stands requires every dev to be working on it. Especially in a world of AI, efforts on this would be better spent on AI agents that replace screenreaders.