Me ha gustado el artículo My Accessibility Journey: What I’ve Learned So Far. Empieza con una pregunta que más de una vez me han hecho:
Last year I gave a talk about CSS and accessibility at the stahlstadt.js meetup in Linz, Austria. Afterward, an attendee asked why I was interested in accessibility: Did I or someone in my life have a disability?
La respuesta del autor del artículo es NO y la mía también es NO. Y como dice el autor, esta respuesta suele sorprender a la gente que parece que espera alguna respuesta del estilo "mi hijo/hermano/padre tiene una discapacidad y por eso me interesa la accesibilidad web".
Todo lo que se cuenta en el artículo es interesante pero aquí me gustaría destacar lo siguiente:
7. A solid knowledge of HTML solves a lot of problems
It’s impressive to see how JavaScript and the way we use it has changed in recent years. It has become incredibly powerful and more important than ever for web development. At the same time, it seems HTML has become less important. There is an ongoing discussion about CSS in JavaScript and whether it’s more efficient and cleaner than normal CSS from a development perspective. What we should talk about instead is the excessive use of <div> and <span> elements at the expense of other elements. It makes a huge difference whether we use a link or a <div> with an onclick handler. There’s also a difference between links and buttons when it comes to accessibility. Form items need <label> elements, and a sound document outline is essential. Those are just a few examples of absolute basics that some of us forgot or never learned. Semantic HTML is one of the cornerstones of accessible web development. Even if we write everything in JavaScript, HTML is what is finally rendered in the user’s browser.
(Re)learning HTML and using it consciously prevents and fixes many accessibility issues.
