I just had day long training about accessibility and I take back what I said. I think I oversimplified the reason for making sites accessible. Technology has come a long way to support dynamic content and there are a lot of tools out there facilitate accessibility. I’ve always had accessibility kind of in the back of my mind. However, when I saw realtime someone with a disability (smart guy) navigate the internet or an app you kind of feel for them. Even with the best of sites screen reader technology is rough. We had a very smart individual show use what it is like navigating the web. He is blind. That didn’t stop him from meeting Mark Zuckerburg and “The Rock”. Mark Zukerburg actually asked this individual directly what Facebook could do to make the website/app more accessible. You know what this persons answer was? He wanted to know the people in a picture. This is before tagging. In some ways this person is the reason why people are identifiable in photos. That was years ago. Honestly I never actually tried to navigate a website using software like JAWS. When you see in person how proficient people without sight are with tools like this it is quite amazing. I never had two thoughts about it. I knew basic accessibility prinicples but never actually used a screen reader. The one thing that I immediately noticed is that the screen reader is fast. Like I couldn’t make heads or tails of half the stuff this was saying. Yet, this guy who was blind understood everything. It was actually quite amazing to see. To someone like myself it sounded like utter none sense unless you really slowed it down and even then it was this cryptic sequence of words. People asked a few questions about what his friends say when they hear his or the web interrpretattion of the website. People who are really proficient with these technologies are amazing. They are basically listening to a bunch of utter none sense at a rate which I could not comprehend. We also talked how certain websites have terrible accessibility and they put him off. In my decade of dev I have never heard someone with a disability like being blind speak well and articulate the importance of accessibility. After the seminar I had a whole knew respect for accessibility. The guest speaker who is blind but extremely smart (MA political science) and the director/lead of the organization I’m associated with really did a great job to explain WCAG in a way that wasn’t dry, and boring. I apologize for that original post. After having a seminar from acessibility experts and to listen and have a demo from someone who has a disability. I was looking at this topic from the wrong perspective. I think it is very important for people to know some basic to intermediate concepts about accessibility. That not only includes developer but designers as well.
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