Overview

Sometimes it is a Monday, and other days are another week from last post. This last week was focused on my tests and preparation for that. I spend time thinking about accessibility and WCAG. I found many sources of the importance and used some of those in my response. This was the last IT test for high school, so I may not have anything like this, or something similar (depending on what I do next year and what the course is…).

What was completed

"Good websites don't need to follow accessibility requirements.” (prompt for web dev test)

The prompt that is above is the one that I got. I needed to consider if accessibility was important and the significance of not implementing an accessible website. I decided that it is best most of the time to be accessible. To simplify the argument, I did decide to be on the absolute even though there are many cases where it doesn’t need to be. Which meant I also didn’t cover much of when it can be fine to skip the layer of accessibility.

Post completing this task, I realised that accessibility isn’t a binary option as there are many factors that are involved. In my response, I was focusing into the screen reader aspect, while it is good, there are other things that are important. Other things like Netflix, may not need to implement as much for blind people as they won’t be able to consume the movies as well (deaf people need good subtitles). I did make sure to say that following the standard allows for better developer experience with the required way to format tags and limits of tags per page (ie only one h1 because it is the most important thing).

There were lots of other things that I wish I included but I feel like the current thing is fine. I just talked about how disabled people require good implementation of accessibility to be able to comprehend it well (because of the already disadvantages). I continued with how it is beneficial to the average user (like colour contrast because it needs to be easily distinguishable). And ended with the developer experience of being able to maintain and understand new codebases easier (which leads to better products with the more time). I said that most “good” websites are following the guidelines, but it isn’t a requirement.

Reflection

But didn’t you say that they W3C aren’t as good anymore?

You may know that I have mixed feelings about W3C. This may lead you to thinking my opinion of the accessibility rules as bad. However, in reality I think it is good from the standpoint that they are a standard, I just don’t like the rules that they are enforcing. I hope that they will update it to become more modern and allow for the new features of the web to work well (ie better JS rules), and then I may decide to care more about it.

If you had more time, could you have done better?

I like the 70 minute time as it allows me to go in depth significantly but not too much. If it was higher, there would be higher expectations that I probably won’t be able to do. My whole schooling (at least high school) is basically about the 1-hour responses/tests to prove that you know what you have studied in class. This means that I have not been trained for these much and it would probably co weird. But the AST is just around the corner and that had a ~2.5 hour time to make a long response (and this is a bit scare for me for above reasons)…

How did your notes sheet impact you?

I had lots of examples and notes about how accessibility is useful which allowed me to use different examples to made a point. I do wish I spend some more time on it because there was lots of white space and some duplicated examples which wasn’t that useful. Even though I had lots that weren’t relevant, I still would have rathered to have more because of the fact that I did more research and that I could have gotten more diverse examples.