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Comment by Theodores | Hacker News Reader

This article makes a lot of noise about Uber's commitment to accessibility. So I am led to believe that this new React gizmo is fully accessible.

Yet Uber can't be bothered to make efforts to get basic accessibility right on the page that tells us this.

The main content is not in a <main> element, this <main> element being the landmark that tells people using assistive technologies where the main content is.

Then the navigation links, e.g. in the footer are not in <nav> elements.

The code sample in the middle is an image. It should be in a <figure>, <pre>formatted and in a <code> block for accessibility.

It is a bit hypocritical to write an article about how wonderful your product is for accessibility and not make it accessible.

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Those are issues with the CMS being used to host the blog. The blog has been around for a long time and isn't using BaseWeb.

What you're suggesting is that when someone releases a library with a commitment to accessibility, they are also responsible to reach out to some completely unrelated comms-focused team, take over their CMS workflow, rewrite it entirely with the new framework, and only then make a blog post about the thing you were trying to talk about.

So, what you're saying is, Uber is committed to accessibility when its easy for them and there's big PR points to score. That's probably correct.

No, what I'm saying is that Uber has thousands of engineers and hundreds of web projects, and it's a bit silly to suggest that if one team releases some net positive thing, the cost/time for getting every Uber property to benefit from that thing immediately is zero, and that by not doing such trivial work, Uber is a bad bad dog.

It is not difficult to put a <figure> in Wordpress with some code inside it.

Some things you either have or you don't. Accessibility is one of those things. Either you think it is actually important or you don't.

The Uber comms team also need to be living and breathing accessibility. It is part of what comms is about.

Who is "you"? Me personally, the team behind BaseWeb, the comms team, Uber as a whole? Companies by definition can't "care" since they are emotionless entities, so you must mean a physical person. But physical people within a large organization might care about different things with different degrees of priority or be prevented from doing the best thing (tm) for various reasons. But we all already knew that.

There are accessibility issues beyond the landmark elements. For instance the close button on the drag and drop example has no accessible name.

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