5 Tips for Writing Accessible Code As a Software Engineer
Technology forms the major backbone of our society today. However — not all technology is accessible to people with disabilities, which comprise around 15% of the world’s population. According to the 2021 WebAIM study, “97% of the top one million home pages had accessibility issues.” Moreover, according to an analysis from UsableNet Inc., the number of web accessibility lawsuits is expected to reach a total of a whopping 4,195 in 2021. These statistics reveal that we, in the software community, can do a lot better to make our technology more accessible. Software engineers can contribute by baking accessibility in their development process instead of waiting until accessibility auditing or fixing bugs at the end. Here are a few ways on how to get started:
1. Review the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG)
These are an extensive set of guidelines on how to make your web application accessible to not just users who use screen-readers, but also other types of disabilities such as Deaf/Hard of Hearing, cognitive or motor disabilities. Many of these guidelines and principles also apply to Desktop based applications or really any technical product you can think of. For software engineers focused on web development and who want to learn more the accessibility infrastructure of the web, I recommend reading up on Accessible Rich Internet Applications (ARIA) and the Accessibility Tree.
