Comment by martpie | Hacker News Reader

Comment by martpie | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

While I understand the concern, I'm not really sure I buy the argument "JS makes accessibility bad".

It is for sure easier to do things wrong, but if you check at most of the major libraries for front-end (drag-and-drop, routing, dropdowns...), accessibility is built-in, and a critical selling point (e.g react-router, downshift...).

I think the proportion of front-end developers knowing about accessibility is just low, and the result is more visible for JS-heavy websites/webapps, but this is imho an education problem, not an ecosystem issue.

Having worked in agencies, accessibility was always treated as a second-class citizen (by clients or managers, not by developers, trying to push for it), and clients would often say "let's go live without it", then would come back to us asking to finish the job once they saw their competitors got sued for having an inaccessible website.

So JS may be a catalyst, but not the root of the problem. It's our job to push for the importance of it, as we pushed for responsive websites a while ago.

The reality is that the education you're talking about is never going to happen. By the time you had 80% of devs knowing how to do a11y on JS framework #271, a whole new paradigm would have come in. It's because accessibility is not a priority that accessible defaults, which almost definitionally need to be system- or browser-based, are so important.

If you make a form with HTML and style it with CSS, then you're 85% of the way there with accessibility, and chances are it will be usable if you screw the rest up. With JS, even if you're working from a checklist, you're much more likely to get somethign wrong. And then there are regressions. I kind of believe that you know what you're doing, because the kinds of people that hang out on HN often do. But will your second-generation successor, four years from now, know how to update your work without breaking accessibility? Empirically, based on the low level of accessibility on the web (improving, but still pretty tough going), I'd say "no."

Did you really just tell a blind person they're wrong about the effect JavaScript has on web accessibility for the blind? Holy crap man.

I think sites that fail the accessibility test should be shamed into compliance. Possibly like how they handle sites that aren't https. I can just imagine how frustrating it must be to have an impairment that hinders usage of a website. Especially if it might be something essential.

It's mostly fine for me, because I'm technical and can do some weird thing or use OCR tools I made myself or whatever. It's incredibly difficult for the average blind person, who is statistically likely also to be older as well.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com