Thinking of writing an accessibility article

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Hey all,
I’m thinking of writing an accessibility article. Not one targeted to the web directly, but I hope for some feedback on the idea just the same.

So at work, the developers are like most developers-- they hate IE, they all use Chrome as their main browser. We even have some products that actually totally don’t work in IE at all (because things are broken enough, like the back button not working etc).

Thing is, IE is often the browser that assistive tech works best in. Speech rec from Dragon works ok in Firefox and Chrome, but if I want all the commands and features, I’ll use IE.
ZoomText (screen magnifier) enlarges text on many browsers but the only one that consistently looks sharp and never pixellated is IE.
JAWS screen reader works with Firefox and somewhat in Chrome, but usually works really well in IE.

So at work, people from other teams have been asking me about Edge, the browser meant to replace IE. Edge has a completely different code base. It also is currently the only browser to reach 100% at http://html5accessibility.com/ (this only means it meets every correct property/etc exposure from a selected list of accessibility things… it does not mean how well assistive tech works with it).

I’ve got Win7 and I’m not really a Windows person anyway, I do all my work in Linux. But I’m hoping to get a Windows 10 machine soon and since everything I’ve looked up about the accessibility (in practical ways) for Windows 10 stuff like Edge, or the version of IE on 10, or the newest Office stuff is out of date, I’ve thought maybe I’ll test those things. I’ve got JAWS, NVDA, Dragon, ZoomText…

But I’m kinda assuming my audience would be more people who are charged with setting which browsers/OSes their software will support, or people who need to make recommendations on supported platforms/browsers/AT… and not average web developers.

But what do you think? If web developers were to read an article talking about results of testing these things, what do you think should be included? What wouldn’t you want? Should the boring testing results tables or whatever be a separate file that the article links to?

The kinds of articles I’ve appreciated as a web developer are ones like http://accessibleculture.org/articles/2013/02/not-so-simple-aria-tree-views-and-screen-readers/ where I could read it and kinda see what works, what doesn’t… as a developer who was asked “we have this funky menu with arrows you click…” (and I’ll recognise that semantically, that might be a tree view… can I use it?). Except for it being out of date, this is the kind of article I tend to bookmark, refer to, go back to, and he links to code in his tests and I’ll look at that code, too (some of the links have become 404 over time, but they all worked when it was fresh).

Finally, if an article in sort of that style were written, where would be a place you would go to read it? I don’t do blog posts. I would host it somewhere else than my server. Where do you think it belongs? Is it too accessi-weanie for a place with web-dev type content? Does it make sense to be a reference article to a spec?

I’m kinda looking for ideas on how people feel about this kind of thing, to give me ideas.

Thanks,
poes

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Both yes and no, I would appreciate a summary table in the article with a link to read the result atbles online and most important files for download it in a common format, so I could consult it when I forgot the details.

I’m trying to digest your post to see if I have anything useful to share.

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No, I think that those would be good places to read it too.

Absolutely!

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Instead of writing 3rd party article(s) why not create a mini site for the information? that way it can easily be updated as and when.

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To me accessibility very much also has a usability aspect.

In your postings you have often pointed out the usability of design decisions in the term of accessibility. I have much appreciated that.

IMHO we all have shortcomings that make a design more or less useful to us. I for one tend to forget what I try to find if the design puts me through loops searching for it.

I would probably go back to and reread an article that also consider the usability of accessibilty, if you like. I do believe you have a talent to elaborate both aspects, maybe as chapters or intertwined in different areas.

I look forward to read your article(s) also here on Sitepoint.

OT (I think you deserve a smily. )

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