Eric Eggert

“WCAG is hard” is a self-fulfilling prophecy. I teach WCAG, the good parts, to people who are not testers all the time and they usually get along fine. Do they understand all the nuance? All the weird language? Not without help.

But it’s not made for that. Principles and Guidelines bring you further than Success Criteria ever can.

But it’s not more complicated than other standards or even documentation. Don’t be afraid. You got this! 🫂

Aug 14, 2024 at 3:40pmWeb
Show threadEric EggertAug 14, 2024

People distribute the impression that you would learn accessibility by reading WCAG and if it just were easier, we had an accessible world.

This is wrong. You don’t learn to drive by reading the manual of your car and understanding every nuance. You don’t learn to cook well just by reading recipes.

You have to practically apply knowledge and best practices. You have to do the work. And then things click into place because you have routine doing it. (1/2)

Show threadEric EggertAug 14, 2024

WCAG does what it does well, better than the average standard. Read other standards. They are much more complicated.

Is there room for improvement in WCAG? Sure, but it’s not the magic wand people expect it to be. And that is OK. (2/2)

Show threadStevoAug 15, 2024
@jyarbrough @yatil I agree with this. And I'd so love to start doing that work and improving my skills. At this point I should really just start applying to every opportunity I see, tossing out my resume and background and hoping for goodness.
Show threadJustin YarbroughAug 15, 2024
@stevo399 @yatil When I started in the field, the place I was at basically had no idea what they were doing with accessibility, they just had the desire to do it and knew I was a competent screen reader user that could give them constructive feedback. We all learned a lot along the way.
Show threadBenny Powers 🇮🇱🦁Aug 14, 2024
@yatil wai-aria is hard because it has lots of private overloading of related terms

like "focus"

most developers think they know what focus is, until they read the wai-aria combobox pattern

then they open up webkit dev tools and notice that activedescendant is called "shared focus", and chrome dev tools doesn't really tell you about it, and neither does firefox

and while i'm here and salty, also safari doesn't announce it to voiceover, so let's hastily construct a visually-hidden alert role that tries to translate words like "dimmed", "selected" and "3 of 7" into all our supported languages

yeah WCAG is hard sometimes.

edit: let's just take it as a given that "custom widgets aren't allowed" just isn't and will never be a requirement
Show threadEric EggertAug 14, 2024

@bp But that’s aria and browser implementation and tools. That’s not WCAG.

Not using a custom combo box is allowed to meet WCAG, using alternative UI, too. It has nothing to do with WCAG.

Show threadEric EggertAug 14, 2024
@bp I’m on record that the good parts of ARIA should be taken into HTML natively and that everything else is deprecated. Then start from the beginning and do it with components people actually need.
Show threadBenny Powers 🇮🇱🦁Aug 14, 2024
@yatil wouldn't it be more fun if everyone just continued to suffer, though 🤣 ?
Show threadEric EggertAug 14, 2024
@bp That feels like it’s the consensus 🤪