Accessibility & Broadening Your Audience

This week, we discussed accessibility and opening your apps to a broader audience. Think about a time when you struggled to use a website or application. What could have improved your experience? What are you incorporating into your own engineering practice to prevent this from happening to your users?

Many websites often forget to consider the diverse range of users who will be accessing them, focusing heavily on how they, as developers, would use the platform. What gets lost is the usability of the site or service for people with specific accessibility needs. While it's hard to account for every accessibility requirement, there are some that should come standard.

Common Accessibility Issues:

1. Lack of alt tags for navigation
2. Poor responsiveness across web, tablet, and mobile
3. Button functionality
4. Confusing structure
5. Inconsistent or overly nested routes/URLs
6. Lack of dark mode/light mode options
7. Limited language choices

These are common issues that, if addressed, could make a website far more user-friendly and accessible to a wide range of users.

A Personal Experience

I own a Raspberry Pi 5, and one day I accidentally pressed two keys on my keyboard, which turned on the screen reader. I had no idea what I did, but suddenly, every action I took was narrated—what I clicked on, where my mouse was, etc. Even though it wasn’t useful for me, I couldn’t help but feel this was a necessary tool that many people could benefit from.

I found the package responsible for this functionality, and I’m planning to look into integrating it into my app.