In the case of websites... two years ago I started adopting a11y into my front-end code. But while plugins like eslint-plugin-jsx-a11y make the job easier, it honestly was also a huge pain in the ass familiarizing myself with the grotesque state of affairs in web accessibility standards.
However, one of the biggest gains might have been learning to properly leverage every HTML tag to its fullest. Modern day SPAs have all gone back to using wild div forests with no context or metadata available for readers. This also took much less effort than learning the rest of standards compliance. So start there!
After crossing that river, I think that accessibility is complex enough to warrant its own dedicated developer for almost any project if standards are to be achieved.
Still... until our bosses catch up, we do what we can. Here are some great resources for developers who wish to learn more about how to design for accessibility: https://a11yproject.com/resources/#further-reading
P.S. Is it a reasonable heuristic to assume a reader with no visual formatting in their comments might have a good chance of being blind?
> P.S. Is it a reasonable heuristic to assume a reader with no visual formatting in their comments might have a good chance of being blind?
As far as I can recall, most of the blind folks on HN don't post big walls of text. Maybe younger blind people who grew up with text-to-speech and never learned braille are more likely to do that. To me, that would be a good reason for screen readers to deliberately pause for a bit between paragraphs.
In the case of websites... two years ago I started adopting a11y into my front-end code. But while plugins like eslint-plugin-jsx-a11y make the job easier, it honestly was also a huge pain in the ass familiarizing myself with the grotesque state of affairs in web accessibility standards.
However, one of the biggest gains might have been learning to properly leverage every HTML tag to its fullest. Modern day SPAs have all gone back to using wild div forests with no context or metadata available for readers. This also took much less effort than learning the rest of standards compliance. So start there!
After crossing that river, I think that accessibility is complex enough to warrant its own dedicated developer for almost any project if standards are to be achieved.
Still... until our bosses catch up, we do what we can. Here are some great resources for developers who wish to learn more about how to design for accessibility: https://a11yproject.com/resources/#further-reading
P.S. Is it a reasonable heuristic to assume a reader with no visual formatting in their comments might have a good chance of being blind?