“Built-in” accessibility: blessing or curse?

A presentation at Accessibility Club Summit in June 2024 in Amsterdam, Netherlands by Hidde de Vries

Have you ever heard someone say “we can build in accessibility?”. In this room I think there will be people working on a project that “builds in” accessibility… if you are or you’re not, maybe in this talk you’ll hear about some ways to try and build accessibility in.

For the Dutch government, I work on a project called NL Design System, opinions are my own. I am also in some accessibility related groups at the W3C and have my own blog, on hidde dot blog.

As of last month, it is 25 years ago that the W3C released a document in the wild called Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, version 1.0. I personally didn’t know what the web was back then…
To prepare this talk I looked back at the charter of hte group that made these… the goal of these guidelines was to give web developers advice about how to make their work accessible to people with disabilities.

And to be fair, that was still the goal in all the versions that followed it.
As my friend Eric Eggert said: “in the grand scheme of things it’s always the same principles and guidelines” — Eric Eggert (in post about WCAG)
See: Do we need WCAG 3 now? yatil.net/blog/do-we-need-wcag-3-now

If we reflect back on those 25 years, we can see how WCAG changed accessibilility forever, it’s been incredibly successful in the sense that it’s now part of legislation globally.
But there’s also still problems in websites today.

There are websites with sticky elements that cover everything when zoomed in, and they aren’t accessible. (Video played of page showing exactly that)
codepen.io/hidde/pen/PovjPYV

There are still websites with FAQs that aren’t reachable by just a keyboard aren’t accessible.
codepen.io/hidde/pen/ExzXVmb

On Thursday we had European elections here in the Netherlands. When a major news site published the preliminary results, I could not help myself and tried if I could find out the predicted seats per party using a screenreader. Turns out there’s no alt on the image.
Websites with important election results in an image with no alternatives aren’t accessible.

My point is… we still need better websites…

Because lack of ccessibility is a website problem, not a user problem. That could be the end of the talk.
But to be fair, it is also an information and education problem. There’s quite a lot to know about accessibility.

It can be a maze of acronyms, and maybe the seasoned among you know what all of these are, but when you start out that’s a lot to take in.
(WAI-ARIA TECHNIQUES UNDERSTANDING COGA ACT-RULES WCAG 2.1 LEVEL A/A/AAA ATAG AXE LOW VISION ASSISTIVE TECH ACCESSIBLE VR XAUR UAAG ACT MATURITY MODEL WEBVTT AGWG LAWS & POLICIES SEMANTICS CONFORMANCE EVALUATION EARL AUTHORING PRACTICES WCAG-EM ACCESSIBILITY STATEMENTS)

So, in defense of websites… for developers, can be hard to find good code examples. There’s plenty of them, but it can be tricky to dinstinguish between low and high quality).
People also commonly misunderstand the diffference between conformance and guidance, WCAG being the normative document for conformance, and documents like the Authoring Practices being merely guidance.
Working with developers, I often see them struggle with finding out how well ATs and browsers support features. There’s some support charts, but they’re not part of bigger initiatives like Baseline. And that’s not even including actual usability, your perfect ARIA tabs may confuse users if they don’t know the keystrokes, I’ve seen this in user tests.
And then there’s the thing that WCAG often doesn’t tell you what to do. That’s for a reason, if WCAG was very concrete it would need thousands of guidelines and criteria, that would go out of date real quick.

Anyway, this is the situation, even 25 years after WCAG we still have a lot of inaccessible websites. And it’s not trivial for people who make websites.
Many of us, probably incliuding you must have wondered… “Are there opportunities to change the system to improve accessibility across the board?”

Or maybe your manager asked, “Can we integrate accessibility into our practices?”?

Browsers have looked at this too: “Can we display websites better?”

CMSes have also considered this… “Can we help content editors make more accessible content?”

And this is a question for standards bodies too… “Can we make standards that take accessibility into account”?

So this talk is called built-in accessibility: blessing or curse?

And the TLDR is that it really is a bit of both, it can be a blessing and curse.

In the next bit, I’ll show you some ways that accessibility can be built into systems.

Let’s start with Web Platform features

There are features that make a11y possible, e.g. support for alt text in the image tag.
<img src="" alt="" />

And features that do accessibility or semantics for you, like headings, they have a built in role:
<h1>Top news</h1>

A more complex example of that is popover, a recent addition to HTML that has a bunch of accessibility properties built in. Thanks to a lot of effort from Scott O’Hara in particular, aria-expanded is set, and aria-details too in specific cases, and keyboard behaviour is taken care of too.
See this post I co-wrote with Scott O’Hara: On popover accessibility: what the browser does and doesn’t do.
Code example:
<button popovertarget="p"> Toggle popover </button> <div popover id="p"> … </div>

To make sure that standards don’t cause accessibility problems the W3C has a “horizontal review” process, it takes care of things like security and privacy as well, but also accessibility. One interesting project in that area is FAST, an accessibility checklist for specifications.
Still, the standards process can be messy, for lack of a better word, it’s very well possible that features make it into specifications and/or browsers while their accessibility is lacking, which could be both due to lack of consideration or unexpected problems found out afterwards.

this is how far I got transcribing what I said… will update in the future

Chromium Blog, Updates to form controls and focus blog.chromium.org/2020/03/updates-to-form-controls-and-focus.html

Chromium Blog, Updates to form controls and focus blog.chromium.org/2020/03/updates-to-form-controls-and-focus.html

Improvements re making accessibility tree testable >1000 Web Platform Tests labeled “accessibility” See: Improving Web Accessibility with Web Platform Tests webkit.org/blog/15400/improving-web-accessibility-with-web-platform-tests/

TAKEAWAY #1 We need web platform / HTML features that are accessible and/or include accessibility and it’s not trivial

Building accessibility into systems (2) CMSes

Checks in Jooa11y, for Joomla (based on Sa11y)

Checks in Editoria11y v2, for Drupal (Based on Sa11y)

Contrast warnings in Gutenberg, for WordPress Checks in Editoria11y v2, for Drupal (Based on Sa11y)

Porta11y, accessible checks for Portable Text github.com/hidde/porta11y github.com/hidde/porta11y Checks in Editoria11y v2, for Drupal (Based on Sa11y)

TAKEAWAY #2 CMSes can be accessibility assistants and it’s (usually) not trivial

Building accessibility into systems (3) Browsers

f f “Could browsers ix more accessibility problems automatically?” talks.hiddedevries.nl/KKW74X/could-browsers- ix-more-accessibility-problems-automatically

Untruncate text Force focus indication Force colour contrast Suppress autoplay of gifs and videos

TAKEAWAY #3 Browsers could intervene when the web content they serve is inaccessible and it’s (usually) not trivial

Building accessibility into systems (4) Design systems

Design systems can make your patterns repeatable

“Not only is this work not inherently valuable, it is also not inherently harmless” — Amy Hupe Building conscious design systems amyhupe.co.uk/articles/building-conscious-design-systems

Design systems can make good patterns repeatable

Design systems can good make good patterns d ba repeatable or

Design systems can make patterns repeatable so we’d better ensure they’re good

Design systems can teach the nuance between the components

TAKEAWAY #4 Design Systems make code and principles repeatable, ensure you repeat the right things f and it’s (de and initely) it’s not trivial

What are the or: questions constraints? you can ask

What could (possibly) go wrong?

Does the icon disappear in dark mode? Will the tabs break with too many items? What if all buttons in a group are named the same? How do we ensure there’s useful text in <FormFieldError>? f Can we force the label component to be used whenever the text ield component is used?

What decides the accessibility of a component?

Save

The quick brown fox jumps Where does she jump? Over the lazy dog? Well, there is really only one way to ind out… f Find out

Who impacts the accessibility of a UI?

developer QA tester designer Who impacts the accessibility of a UI? researcher content editor

(it’s the whole team)

What impacts the accessibility of a UI?

browser that renders it What impacts the accessibility of a UI? assistive tech (that some of your users use) CMS that is involved with managing it

What impacts the accessibility of a UI? design systems?

A design system can impact through components and docs

What design system components can do • User preference support (dark/forced color mode, text spacing, zoom support) • Accessibility semantics (roles, states, properties) • Keyboard support • Focus management • Support for accessibility features (images: alt support, video players: caption support, etc)

What design system docs can do • All variables/settings documented • Theme validator (colour f contrast, spacing etc) • Full lows: how do components work together? • Showing the right way

What design system docs can do • All variables/settings documented • Theme validator (colour f contrast, spacing etc) • Full lows: how do components work together? • Showing the right way

“Educate, don’t berate” — Meryl Evans (in “Progress over perfection“)

Used as-is Interpreted Components (excluding settings) Documentation Component settings

TAKEAWAY #6 Components that people reuse and documentation that people interpret are an opportunity to inspire quality

What design system marketing should do Avoid overpromising the accessibility impact Say “makes it easier to” instead of “will take care of” ff Emphasise the role of design system in a continuous e ort

NL Design System

Community of 500+ web professionals in all layers of Dutch government who work together. We collect the best components, guidelines, patterns and user research for digital services.

Collaboration through “Relay Model” with quality checks in each of four stages.

Lessons learned

Make it concrete

Make it concrete

Make it concrete “Add error messages for forms into a live region” “Only use assertive live regions when information requires the user’s attention immediately”

Make it concrete: do’s and don’ts

Back guidance up with research

Accessibility audit reports as input for guidelines organisation X organisation Y organisation Z Design Open Hour

Most reported issues as input for guidelines FUT URE

User research as input for patterns

Make it open source More perspectives lead to better quality • Easier to report issues • Easier to steal • Most e ective against reinvention of wheels • Instigates collaboration ff •

Work in the open

Threads in public channels so that people can peak (low-treshold)

Public bi-weekly meetings that are also publised afterwards

Test with people and share the results

Test with users and share the results Because accessibility is more than WCAG

Test with users and share the results Because not everyone will test, your results likely have some use for others

gebruikersonderzoeken.nl

Open design decisions up for automated scrutiny

Save

—nl-button-border-color: #2446AE —nl-button-color: #2446AE Save —nl-button-background-color: #ffffff

—nl-button-border-color: #2446AE —nl-button-color: #2446AE Save —nl-button-background-color: #ffffff

—nl-button-border-color: #2446AE —nl-button-color: #cccccc Save —nl-button-background-color: #ffffff

—nl-button-border-color: #2446AE —nl-button-color: #cccccc Save 🚨 —nl-button-background-color: #ffffff

Verify with process

Verify with process: GOV.UK

Verify with process: NL Design System “Relay Model”

Do handover to consumers with test steps

Handover: USWDS • Explain which tests you’ve done • Explain what consumers of the components should test themselves

Make it concrete Back guidance up with research Make it open source Work in the open Test with users, share the tests Test design tokens Verify with process Handover with test steps

Wrapping up

Built-in accessibility: blessing and curse

Built-in accessibility: blessing and curse “Built-in” is not trivial and not a one-off or quick “fix”. But it’s worth pursuing carefully and in addition to your org’s accessibility work.

What would you do or ask?

Thank you! hidde.blog @hdv@front-end.social Slides: talks.hiddedevries.nl

Hidde de Vries
@hdv

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“We’ll build in accessibility”, they say. Whether it’s in standards, browser functionality, web platform features or design system components… the resulting reality could be anywhere from an enormous opportunity to a huge disappointment . There’s something at stake here. And as an accessibility specialist, you should probably ask questions. In this talk, we’ll look at how “built in” can be effective and how it helps NL Design System to remove barriers at scale.

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