Achieving accessibility through simplicity

For many software teams, especially web developers, accessibility is an extremely burdensome task. Many companies have written checks with an uncomfortable number of zeroes on them to get the job done. Sprinkling ARIA tags all over your DOM to annotate elements with their purpose, and updating these as your DOM changes over time, is no small task, and makes your code more difficult to maintain. It’s not especially surprising that many blind users are constantly frustrated when trying to use the web.

How did SourceHut make such an accessible website, even in the face of these trials? In truth, even though accessibility is important to me, I haven’t worked especially hard to make SourceHut accessible — I have devoted no more than three or four hours, in total, explicitly towards accessibility. Instead, SourceHut is accessible because the core principles of simplicity upon which it is built naturally lead to an accessible design. We’re here today to share our thoughts so that you might apply the same principles to your own website.

First, consider the audience you’re designing for. Your users have a diverse set of abilities, and a varied approach to accessibility is necessarily required to accommodate for them. Different users will have a different experience with your website. There are different levels of visual impairment — near- and far-sighted users, colorblind users, and many degrees of vision impairment ahead of totally blind. Talking about accessibility might bring forth thoughts of the latter group, but a lot of users with partial sight would also benefit if you put care into your visual design. There’s also other considerations than vision — for example, avoid high precision mouse actions for users with limited mobility, and add subtitles to videos for the deaf and hard of hearing.

For general advice on web accessibility, I would start with the following: “trust the web browser”. Leave the page at its default font size and avoid using custom fonts, preferring to use vague selections like “sans-serif” and “monospace”. Don’t mess about with the scroll wheel, don’t override default behaviors on the right click and text selection. Don’t use JavaScript to create custom input elements like text boxes, combo boxes, or scrollbars. The web browser will do all of these things for you — trust it to do a good job.

Remember that the browser is the user agent, not the developer agent. By trusting its defaults, you leave room for users to customize them, choosing a larger text size, a different font, and so on. The user is already comfortable with the way their browser works, and you will fail to capture the subtle nuances of their user agent with your pretty imitations. When accurately using the mouse is a struggle, a user who has gotten used to using the arrow keys in a <select> box is faced with an unreasonable challenge when they encounter a custom drop-down that hasn’t implemented this behavior quite right.

Another case to be careful of is the use of color, contrast, and images. Always make sure that text the user is expected to read is sufficiently distinguishable from its background.Also avoid putting text over a variable background, such as a gradient or tiled background. Be conservative with your use of color — limit bright, visually attractive colors to one or two actionable items on the page, or use them to draw special attention to timely notices, or to warn the user of potentially dangerous actions like deleting data.

Try not to use a purely visual representation of information, such as an icon: these should always be paired with text. Such explanatory text shouldn’t require, for example, hovering to see it — a task which requires high mobility to hit a small target with the mouse, and holding it steady for long enough to make a tooltip appear. Also avoid moving information around — animations and visually complex state transitions. When adding images, always include an “alt” tag with a plain-English description of the image.

Do this exercise with me: cross your eyes, then close one eye. Through this blurry view, can you still identify the major elements and action items on your page? Does anything demand too much or too little attention?

The “alt” tag reference a moment ago is the first time we’ve touched upon many of the conventionally repeated wisdoms about “accessibility” on the web, often included because its value is intuitive and easy to implement. It’s no mistake that we’ve covered little of such conventional wisdom so far: the typical user who benefits from an accessible website is not completely blind, using a screen reader and taking advantage of your ARIA tags. The hard truth is that you just have to make your website simpler and easier to use — for everyone.

But, it wouldn’t do to forget the users with screen readers in any case. Some general advice for such users would be to make good use of semantic HTML, such as <main> , <article> , <section> , <nav> , and so on; along with other elements like <p> to mark paragraphs, <ul> and <ol> as appropriate to mark lists of things, <quote> for, well, quotes, and so on. Screen readers can interpret these to understand the layout of your page better and provide contextual clues to the user.

Prefer to organize your site’s information logically , rather than spatially . A logical hierarchy of information is more intuitive if you have less visual awareness. Make sure your page is organized so that if read linearly, from start to finish, without CSS, it still makes sense. Avoid littering marketing garbage, superlatives, and ads for other parts of the site (or even ads outright) throughout your page, as skipping these is more difficult for a screen reader than for the typical visitor. A good way of simulating the screen reader experience is to view your page with Lynx . Conveniently, Lynx does not support JavaScript. :wink:

This seems like a lot of effort to go to for accessibility! But, if you read closely, this is mostly a list of things to avoid doing. The SourceHut approach side-steps many of these problems by focusing on simplicity. The JavaScript-free interface is more accessible right out of the gate, and by not cramming too much into a single page it’s much easier to flow and organize in an accessible way. This advice also leaks quite generally into the broader subject of usability , which is no mistake: investing in accessibility makes your service better for everyone.

SourceHut also benefits from some design choices which extend beyond the web. For example, by focusing on email for discussions, patches, and code review, and insisting on plain text , many blind users can choose to completely side-step the web interface and interact with the services and users on it from the comfort of their mail client, using only Plain Jane Text emails. Then, when they have questions, they can join our IRC chat room, a medium used exclusively to exchange short, plain-text messages, without the nightmare of navigating the Slack interface with a screen reader.

In summary, if you want to get accessible quick, a good start for your new website might eschew npm install in favor of this:

<!doctype html>
<meta charset="utf-8 />
<title>My cool website!</title>
<main>
  <h1>My cool website</h1>
  <p>Welcome to my cool website!
</main>

Which, in case you were unaware, is a completely valid HTML 5 document!