008-accessibility.md

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♿️ Accessibility	2023-03-31 18:11:56 +1300	false	My takeaways from a talk on accessibility	My takeaways from a talk on accessibility	Accessibility	Magdeline Huang	true	false	false	true	https://canonical.url/to/page	false	false	false	false	true	true	true	true	true	true	image alt caption relative hidden https://www.searchenginejournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/9-ways-you-can-make-your-website-more-accessible-5f3f5d3bd7a34.png <alt text> <text> false true	URL Text appendFilePath https://github.com/xsol05/xsol05.github.io/blob/main/content Suggest Changes true

I recently attended my first ever dev meet up hosted by Full Stack Dev Group!

Here's my takeaways from the accessibility talk by Ben Evans. You can find the slides here.

1. What is more accessible is highly dependent on the user. Eg larger text would be more accessible for users with failing sight but smaller text would be more accessible for users with tunnel vision. So bottom line is to cater accessibility of your platform to your largest user group.
2. Might be a little controversial but web accessibility kinda got worse with the emergence of CSS and JS frameworks (cue random divs and spans 🥲)
3. Use semantic HTML! Eg instead of making a custom accordion, use the inbuilt HTML <details> and <summary> tag. I was actually working on building an accordion that time and had just learnt about those tags so super cool to have it mentioned in the talk!
4. You don’t need alt text for everything 👀 If it’s just a decorative image, just provide a blank alt. If it’s conveying info like a graph, explicitly specify the info.
5. How can we get businesses and not just FE devs and designers to care about accessibility? Just do it 🤡 Of course there might be certain times where you need to make a calculated decision and sacrifice accessibility, but the point is to not ask for permission and just always have accessibility at the core of what you do.
6. So how do we actually make our website more accessible? The speaker Ben Evans gives some great practical tips from slide 22 onwards. There’s also a bunch of resources on slide 37.

Overall, really great talk! Thanks Ben 😁