Progressive Enhancement: Accessible Web Design On A Silver Platter
Part One: What it is, and starting with JUST the text!
I’ve had a number of folks contact me directly about my recent article “Building A More Accessible And Simpler Hamburger Menu” in regards to the how/why of the markup choices I made in building its simple demo. The core of how I built it is via “progressive enhancement”, which in my opinion is the heart of accessible design.
Many artists out there who call themselves designers don’t even know what this is, or if they do they dismiss it as it makes their skillset irrelevant. As I’ve said many the time design is engineering that incorporates art as one of its many facets. There is more to design than what something looks like, particularly when modern design in many if not all industries now has accessibility as a legal requirement.
I had already written an article on my website about this, but it is now a decade old, and seriously out of date, so let’s make a new version of this.
Warning, this article assumes at least a beginners knowledge of HTML and CSS. If you don’t know the basics of each, I’d suggest going through the introductory tutorials on MDN first.
