Quicklinks: Hating Accessibility or Dealing With Accessibility

I was shocked and horrified yesterday, when I read some of the comments under Ajaxian’s interview with Christian Heilmann on unobtrusive JavaScript. There is an air of selfishness (unobtrusive JavaScript “takes too long to develop”), misunderstanding (it “adds complexity”) or general pigheadedness (”target audience is lame”) about the comments from those who are against the idea of unobtrusive JavaScript. There are people out there without JavaScript enabled and, if your site does not work without JavaScript, it causes problems.

So, just as accessibility was getting a kicking by certain individuals over at Ajaxian, Jonathon Snook stood up and asked, consequently answering from his point of view, what does accessibility mean? I liked the analogy that accessibility is a spectrum, covering lots of cases, lots of people. It is not just about blind people, it is not just about making sites work without JavaScript enabled, it covers topics as wide ranging as colour blindness to quadriplegia. There are a lot of things that everyone can do to make sites accessible to more people, the simplest often having the biggest results (like ensuring all images have meaningful alt attributes defined) and reading Jonathon’s view as someone who doesn’t preach accessibility, but uses the tools available in the best way he knows, is refreshing.

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