Chapter 14

Chapter 14, Making Content Accessible, is out. Just like chapters 11–13, I was the primary author, but one huge difference is how little I knew going in about accessibility; just enough to be dangerous, you might say. The deep dive I did in order—to write this chapter, but coincidentally also for my day job—led me to a much deeper understanding.

I found out in detail how accessibility works in a real browser and which features were the most important features. I also broadened my conception of the features I already knew about, like keyboard input, CSS zoom, and focus rings. And I learned interesting things about ARIA, for example that the first rule of ARIA is not to use ARIA if possible! That is: accessible web sites are hard (very hard) to build from scratch, and you should leverage built-in browser patterns as much as possible in order to end up with a result that is accessible to all users. Or, in other words, read this chapter so you know how browsers implement those built-in patterns. :)

I’d like to thank David Tseng for a thorough read-through of the chapter, Aaron Leventhal and David Bolter for advice and guidance, and all of them and more for teaching me a thing or two about the subject. They’re the real accessibility experts I relied on to help inform this chapter.

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