CODEX

Accessibility 101 — Good Client-side JavaScript

You Should ENHANCE An Already Working Page, Rather Than Be The Only Means of Providing Functionality.

I’ve spent the past decade working as accessibility, efficiency, and usability consultant to companies who have found themselves in court over accessibility failings. When I first started out in this type of freelancing I already had three decades of programming under my belt, around 12 years of that working with web technologies. At that time in 2010 the most common failings were easy ones to fix … well, if you could kick the ignorant PSD jockeys under the DELUSION they were designers to the curb.

Illegible colour contrasts; fixed width layouts; illegible undersized fonts in pixel metrics; These were the daily routine… I came to call them the “Trifecta of /FAIL/ at web development”. More so when “frameworks”, the monuments to ignorance, incompetence, and ineptitude were involved.

As time has pressed on frameworks got fancier and developers got dumber. Inaccessible broken non-graceful degrading JavaScript has soared past those other bad practices, to the point that with most of my recent clients it’s not a simple patch job. Instead everything they have client-side facing needs to be discarded wholesale and…