5 ways to improve Accessibility in 2024 | by Daniel Berryhill

Ring in the new year with a more accessible web

The web could use your help. It could use some people of goodwill to make it a more accessible place. Whether you’re a developer, accessibility expert, or designer, you can make a significant impact for the accessibility of your team’s content.

Here are 5 non-technical things we all can do (or do more of) to improve the web in 2024.

Your accessibility folks are not a safety net. They are specialized members of your team that deserve respect and a seat at the table.

Too often, developers haphazardly publish inaccessible content as if accessibility is not important or that it’s someone else’s problem. You should be in regular contact with accessibility personnel. They don’t like meetings any more than you do, but you should invite them to your design discussions (same with QA, by the way).

After all, why waste untold hours designing the perfect interface when you’ll have to go back to the drawing board after it gets tested for accessibility? As Anna E. Cook, M.S. states in 8 common questions about accessible UX:

Retrofitting web experiences to be accessible is far more expensive than it is to build them accessibly in the first place. Many components written without regard to accessibility will need to be rewritten, which can cost a lot.

Reach out, include them, and listen.

This is no time for egos. When you learned HTML the first time, you likely did not learn enough about accessibility, how different elements and attributes are interpreted by assistive technology, or proper semantics.

Even many (if not most) tutorials get it wrong with respect to accessibility. The forgiving nature of HTML — or rather, the browser’s rendering of it — often lead to undisciplined work.

Swallow your pride and go back to lesson one. I guarantee you’ll learn something new.

I recommend the MDN Docs tutorial for HTML for starters.