Applying accessibility fixes with stealth for the greater good

Summary

Accessibility had never really played a significant role since I started working as a front-end developer in 2019. It didn’t have a significant role in my boot camp, or in YouTube tutorials I watched, and certainly not in my job. At some point I got very invested in accessibility, because it was the missing link for me in my profession. Suddenly, the things I built not only looked good, but they also worked as expected when using a keyboard and a screen reader. Slowly, practicing web development with accessibility in mind became the new normal for me. Unfortunately though, accessibility is still far from normal in the tech industry. Before I get into the craft, technical aspects and how to sneak fixes in, I would first like to address that a major inspiration for this piece was The Accessibility Operations Guidebook by Devon Persing. If you haven’t heard this term before, here’s a summary from the Wikipedia on ableism: Ableism […] is discrimination and social prejudice against physically or mentally disabled people. Ableism characterises people as they are defined by their disabilities and also classifies disabled people as being inferior to non-disabled people. In the following, I will try to use my own experiences to illustrate when I have encountered ableism during my job. Medical model of disability Whenever I brought up the topic and pointed out barriers, it was assumed that these barriers arose or existed because people with disabilities were using the product. So the fault lies with the people, not the product. This is the medical model of disability, which assumes that people, rather than their environment, are the problem: This model links a disability diagnosis to an individual’s physical body. The model supposes that a disability may reduce the individual’s quality of life and aims to correct or diminish the disability with medical intervention. As long as you can operate everything with the mouse and you can still somewhat recognise the light grey font o...