Accessibility patterns

I was talking with Steve this afternoon, and he put into words some of the stuff I have been thinking about recently.

One of the dangers for developers trying to make things more accessible is believing they understand assistive technology in the way a user does. Unless you use assistive technology everyday you don’t really know what it’s like and even then there is a lot of user preference.

I was talking about how we need to focus on ways to help developers understand how screen readers work without trying to actively use them. To apply ways of working based on understanding the technology and the archetypes of behaviour. Steve pointed out that these were accessibility patterns.

I love this idea. It’s classic software engineering, but it fits so well. A pattern is a solution to a problem space, rather than a specific problem. That works really well with accessibility where one size definitely doesn’t fit all. Talking patterns also gives us anti-patterns. These are known bad solutions to a problem space, something to be avoided.

What this means in practice is we can give developers ways to work which fit a defined set of problems, and ways not to work which we know cause problems. However the developers don’t need to know more than the problem space in order to apply the solution. They don’t need to check with assistive technology themselves to validate (sites always need usability testing with assitive technology by real users still!).

Keep an eye on this space for some accessibility patterns in the near future.

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Web Development, Accessibility, Screen Readers