Affordance. The lack of requirement for instructions on candy bars. Convention. The knowledge that it will taste good.
If someone placed a candy bar on the very top shelf which a child cannot reach, even by standing on a step stool, the child may understand the benefit of the candy bar but that isn’t going to help him get there. His mother was completely against accessible design. And the child’s candy-fix takes the toll.
This concept transfers to the virtual environment when we see a 3D-shaped button on a web page. Affordance allows us to understand to push it with a mouse-click. Convention tells us that something will happen. Accessibility is something completely in control of the mother – the designer.
It is unfortunate that when I read the most common list of excuses for designers who don’t prioritize accessibility, I felt like their excuses were legitimate. For all I knew, maybe accessibility did require a big team to build out? Who would really notice if the site was inaccessible anyways? Why should aesthetics be compromised? Maybe this was more important for some projects than others? But what if the target demographic isn’t disabled?
So after completing this reading, I realized that I was pretty ignorant as to why there was this great need for accessible web design and why it’s worth it. I also acknowledged I was just scared of what other practices I would have to learn and implement.
But then I was reassured at how basic these concepts are that make the world wide web a better place. The overall practices are so simple and just establish some guidelines for organization. The best practices for accessibility provides a basic backend language and explanation for buttons and content that really shouldn’t hurt any aspect of web design – they can only do good. So why not?
It would be great if these techniques could become “second nature” and just a part of the mental model we use to build websites. Hopefully we are getting there, considering that this article was written 4 years ago. The web where accessibility is a given should be just how it is.