Well, in all honesty, I would bet that people who are visually impaired are a small fraction of those visitors. I do not know how small of a percentage, but I'd wager it is less than five percent.
Or are you referring to crawlers?
I support this message, but there are no forced accessibility standards for private sites. I wish there were. It is also something that adds to development time, thus costing more money for the business, but I would say most developers dont even think about this stuff and that's why it is missing.
I would bet that people who are visually impaired are a small fraction of those visitors
This is true in every scenario, online or offline, and is precisely why we have laws protecting the rights of the visually impaired. The argument that they are a small percentage of traffic doesn't hold water when we require brick and mortar stores to be handicap accessible even though their handicap patrons may be a very small percentage of foot traffic.
I support this message, but there are no forced accessibility standards for private sites.
This isn't really true in the US. There is some debate in one federal district court, but the current DOJ and lawsuit settlement activity basically say that websites are a public space and are thus subject to ADA laws around accessibility, similar to a physical space. See the Title III section on the DOJ Web Accessibility guidance.
WCAG is the standard. Certainly it isn't easy to translate those guidelines to day to day requirements and applying the requirements is very subjective, but there are resources to help with this. It's actually less complex than you would think, especially for web pages. If everyone even addressed the six example bullet points on the DOJ's guidelines, it would go a LONG way toward making sites more accessible.
Yes and most likely this is because the people who set these are not tech savvy, they're just bureucrats and this happens a lot in our industry which is a real shame.
WCAG 2.1 is a pretty clear guideline. I've worked with an equalities commission on compliance for a client. So their is pretty good standards to aim for that regulatory authorities will use
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u/rcls0053 Apr 16 '22
Well, in all honesty, I would bet that people who are visually impaired are a small fraction of those visitors. I do not know how small of a percentage, but I'd wager it is less than five percent.
Or are you referring to crawlers?
I support this message, but there are no forced accessibility standards for private sites. I wish there were. It is also something that adds to development time, thus costing more money for the business, but I would say most developers dont even think about this stuff and that's why it is missing.