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Comment by digitalengineer | Hacker News Reader

> I don't know that a check box is a check box if it's only styled to look like one. ...a crime against humanity.

Please style your elements and use alt-text, people.

I always try my best to make things as accessible as possible by following accessibility standards and semantic elements the best that I can. It is more difficult than one would think though, especially without fully understanding the perspectives of those who need the bit of extra consideration. I'm sure I fall short on many things which would help these people use my software more effectively, but this article provided some interesting insights.

I know there are some checklists and some tools out there which help verify certain accessibility standards (for web applications at least), but does anyone know of a better way to test/verify accessibility without actually getting e.g. someone blind to try things out and provide feedback?

Personally when I write webpages, I turn on VoiceOver on my Mac and run through the page's features. Just doing that usually points me to a few pain points that I can alleviate with ARIA and different HTML structuring choices. For hard mode and possibly better results, close your eyes and only rely on the screen reader.

That makes sense. Actually trying out the accessibility features myself sounds... interesting.

A lot of it is manual, but there is this handy chrome tool to catch the obvious problems: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/wave-evaluation-to...

Isn't the point being made there that semantic markup is not the same thing as styling?

The dream of the semantic web being semantic all the way down died, there's no reason to use CSS and javascript to create things that act like forms.

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