Digital Accessibility
Recently, I took a workshop on digital accessibility. I always wanted to learn more about accessibility, as it is often neglected. The general attitude of neglect towards accessibility impacts the ways people use the internet.
In the workshop, we were taught about the general non-text element functions in HTML to enable screen readers. These were the standard set of aria labels, fig captions, and headers. I learned about existing design patterns for better screen reader parsing. I was glad to see work being done to make the internet marginally better.
Besides what I learned about digital accessibility, I want to argue designing digital accessibility and building it on the internet will benefit everyone. Accessibility and usability are mutually beneficial concepts.
Speech technology, e-books, and closed captions are a small subset of the everyday technology we have gained from addressing accessibility. Like how the wheelchair button saves you in moments when you are carrying things, accessibility benefits all users of the internet.
Citations
Kulkarni, M. (2019). Digital accessibility: Challenges and opportunities. IIMB Management Review, 31(1), 91–98. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.iimb.2018.05.009