HN Explorer

Ask HN: Accessibility best practices for web apps?

3 points by NetOpWibby ↗ HN
This question has been on my mind for some time and the recent post on here about Slack’s apparent disregard for blind users prompted me to create the post you’re reading right now.

I’m working on a social network and I’ve been testing in Chrome for their Lighthouse feature and fixed some accessibility issues. However, I’d like to know if there are other great references that y’all can recommend me.

1 comment

[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 14.7 ms ] thread
robmc_
Chrome has made significant improvements but has several support issues when navigating the web using assistive technologies (ATs). The Lighthouse feature is good for looking at the accessibility tree and testing though. For your testing efforts, I would focus on IE and Firefox for Windows as that is what most users of ATs will be using. Freedom Scientific, the makers of the JAWS screen reader, suggests using the ESR version of Firefox until some bugs that were introduced last fall are resolved (http://blog.freedomscientific.com/mozilla-and-freedom-scient...).

This link might be a bit intimidating but you can review the WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) content to see what is required for digital accessibility support.

https://www.w3.org/TR/UNDERSTANDING-WCAG20/

If you want more concise Best Practices that map to these standards but are a bit less intimidating, check out the Best Practices on webaccessibility.com.

https://www.webaccessibility.com/best_practices.php