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What are your favorite stories about accessibility victories you were involved in? Did those victories teach you anything that might help the rest of us achieve more victories?
A little over a year ago, I started my accessibility crusade at Andela and the developer community in Lagos. In what is probably best described as accessibility harassment, I started out doing free accessibility testing, reviews, and feedback. Every time I had to unblock someone on a problem, they got an accessibility audit. I made several twitter threads on accessibility, low-hanging fruits, and inclusive thinking. After one year of crusading, I have good news, a number of developers and designers have been won-over to the accessibility-first camp. They are not experts but they're making an effort, moving us one step closer to a world of accessible products.
What I have learned.
My favourite accessibility victories are any interaction where someone responds to how to make something more accessible with excitement and a desire to learn how to work together to do that.
Most of the time, unfortunately, accessibility is met with a wall: "Why do we care about this? It's only X percentage of users." So, whenever a team seems keen to figure things out (even if they lack much knowledge around accessibility), I consider that a win.
The next step/prospective win is figuring out how to empower the team so that accessibility isn't my singular cross to bear, but something that's discussed when I'm not around. I find it to be a win when colleagues install accessibility tools into their workflow or share that they checked something with a screen reader or even asked during a meeting "How does this decision impact the accessibility of the product?"!
A personal win is that I spent most of this week learning about how to make complex tables accessible. It's really a clear demonstration of how it's far simpler to make the content accessible first by reducing complexity of the table, then with what we're left with, figuring out how to lightly sprinkle necessary aria and visuallyhidden attributes to ensure the data is presented in the most thorough way for as many people as possible.
A PM once asked "Segun, how long will it take to build this page if we didn't care about accessibility". I responded "the same time it'll take to make it accessible". I went on to deliver and the team made accessibility a product requirement.
Tatiana Mac
Open Source Maintainer/Developer