As someone who is a huge advocate of accessibility, from both growing up with a grandmother who had polio (and one of the first advocates of accessibility for people with disabilities, she actually was at the forefront of making NYC sidewalks accessible with the slopes at crosswalks) and now being handicapped myself (due to a serious illness), in all forms—I find this to be incredibly disheartening. Accessibility should not be an afterthought when design and coding a site or app, developers need to build these functionalities into their code from the get go and not something that they rush to implement at the end, especially if it involves using third-party "fixes" that obviously are not fixes at all.
Having said that, it is not entirely the fault of developers. There is a clear lack of guidance and consensus about accessibility requirements. Not only is there a lack of clear guidance, sure we have WCAG 2.0 and W3C WAI but just having those doesn't ensure compliance. I think companies like Google, Bing, etc. need to start to take accessibility compliance seriously. Non-compliance should seriously hurt SEO rankings. At the very least these companies could place a label next to the result with an accessibility compliance rating (or something similar). Not only do these giant tech companies need to step up and do their part, but governments need to do their part and legislate this. The US just failed to pass the Online Accessibility Act (HR 8478) designed specifically address these issues. [Ref: https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/legal-and-compliance/...]
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 14.1 ms ] threadHaving said that, it is not entirely the fault of developers. There is a clear lack of guidance and consensus about accessibility requirements. Not only is there a lack of clear guidance, sure we have WCAG 2.0 and W3C WAI but just having those doesn't ensure compliance. I think companies like Google, Bing, etc. need to start to take accessibility compliance seriously. Non-compliance should seriously hurt SEO rankings. At the very least these companies could place a label next to the result with an accessibility compliance rating (or something similar). Not only do these giant tech companies need to step up and do their part, but governments need to do their part and legislate this. The US just failed to pass the Online Accessibility Act (HR 8478) designed specifically address these issues. [Ref: https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/legal-and-compliance/...]
also internationally government requirements are not always what they could be, however I have high hopes that the EU will end up pushing stringent accessibility requirements based on https://www.w3.org/WAI/about/projects/wai-coop/ and https://ec.europa.eu/social/main.jsp?catId=1202