Accessibility

If that's the case, you may wonder, why does APG focus on ARIA only? There's no bad intent here… I think it is simply because it is written by a subgroup of the ARIA Working Group. That Working Group specifies ARIA and it has a deliverable to show how to use it. This makes good sense. But again, it isn't ideal if the intention is guidance that helps developers build the very best for users with disabilities (which I think is the goal we should really want to optimise for). Nobody seems to have that as a deliverable.

‘Developer experience’ is a phrase sometimes frowned upon, especially when contrasted with user experience. If we had to choose between them, of course, user experience would be the first choice. But the choice isn't binary like that. If the stars are aligned, one can lead to the other. Companies that make developer-focused products (like CMSes, versioning control, authentication, payment providers, databases etc) usually have a dedicated “developer experience” department that ensures developers can use the product well. Among other things, they try to reduce friction.

I believe effective accessibility guidance answers “how easy will this make it for people to get it right”, and probably also ”how will this avoid that people take the wrong turn”.

In this post, I've tried to lay out what my ideal accessibility guidance looks like. The gist of it is: make it easier for people to get accessibility right. And the opposite, too: make it harder to get it wrong. I feel the closer we can get to that, the more accessible interfaces can become. I think this is the way to go: guidance that is holistic, well-tested and optimised for developer experience (or, more broadly, the experience of anyone touching web projects in a way that can make or break accessibility).