@ics Interestingly when the web was still a lot younger, say, 2005 or so when WCAG was first introduced, you needed to know far less about that language you're describing.
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@ics Interestingly when the web was still a lot younger, say, 2005 or so when WCAG was first introduced, you needed to know far less about that language you're describing. A lot of smart people came up with sensible defaults that mostly just worked if you used them the way they were intended to be used. Needless to say ... that's not what we did, and now here we are
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R relay@relay.infosec.exchange shared this topic
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@ics Interestingly when the web was still a lot younger, say, 2005 or so when WCAG was first introduced, you needed to know far less about that language you're describing. A lot of smart people came up with sensible defaults that mostly just worked if you used them the way they were intended to be used. Needless to say ... that's not what we did, and now here we are
@zersiax The problem we experience with WCAG was this: according to it we were at "AA", and with a few tweaks we reached "AAA" where we had control (we provide virtual data rooms, so the content is out of our control).
But when we started using screen readers, it all fell apart because yes, most of our screen was readable but just either super complicated, waste of time, or in some cases completely illogical to a screen reader-user. This we had invest another 3-4 months just to make everything more logical, useful, and also more efficient to use for screen readers users.
So, WCAG is good, but not sufficient – it is, IMO, sufficient for legal reasons but really not in terms of real-world accessibility.
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@zersiax The problem we experience with WCAG was this: according to it we were at "AA", and with a few tweaks we reached "AAA" where we had control (we provide virtual data rooms, so the content is out of our control).
But when we started using screen readers, it all fell apart because yes, most of our screen was readable but just either super complicated, waste of time, or in some cases completely illogical to a screen reader-user. This we had invest another 3-4 months just to make everything more logical, useful, and also more efficient to use for screen readers users.
So, WCAG is good, but not sufficient – it is, IMO, sufficient for legal reasons but really not in terms of real-world accessibility.
@ics Yep. Reaching AAA is, in a large amount of cases, really difficult/almost impossible to do. Even most legal assessments are based on AA.
But the web moves far, far faster than WCAG can keep up with, so it can absolutely be a bit of a square-peg-round-hole situation to follow the letter of the law where it is concerned. Working with actual native screen reader users, switch users, keyboard-only users etc. is vital in making sure you're not losing sight of the users through all the compliance jargon
I myself am a blind screen reader user but I'm trained to also follow keyboard-only non-screenreader workflows so when I audit, I do both, and look at the code as I have a developer background. I get to work from that intersection of knowing how the end user uses things, and how a developer can give them that experience
