As front-end developers, we bear significant responsibility to ensure that our teams’ creations can be used by real people. We’re often told that accessibility is a “nice idea,” but that it’s too costly to learn, implement, or validate, or that people who “need accessibility” can just ask someone to help them. We then build sites and apps for an audience of mythical people with exceptional eyesight and hearing, full range of motion in their bodies, impeccable memory, and as much attention span as we think they should have.
We can do better, and if we want to take pride in crafting quality software, we must. Learn what accessibility really covers, how to incorporate it into ongoing development, and how to verify we’re doing it correctly.
