Hey, I have been doing web work for over a decade and have been seeing more and more stringent requirements related to ADA Compliance and am sort of thrown for a loop at the best ways to address things. It seems like perhaps if you are building a fresh site from the ground on up perhaps it is slightly more straightforward but a lot of remediation work seems like a nightmare at best.
My process has typically been, get color contrast straight, clean up some chunks of code that maybe aren't very semantic, run Axe Deque's Chrome extension to see what that pulls up, fix some stuff from that, do some manual checks and common sense checks, add a few aria labels, then run it through WAVE and circle back to Axe Deque to try and get it as close to 100%, check that tab key does something and arrow keys allow some functionality, and call it a day. Now, I am finding myself reviewing things in Windows High Contrast mode, pulling my hair out nitpicking how I am naming roles and labels, adding IBMs Accessibility Checker which seems even more stringent and shooting for 80-90% on that, really spending a lot of time with tabindex and :focus styles and then reading all sorts of contradictory stuff from one blog to the next. Now people want accessibility reports. Seems like everyone does something different and there is no standard other than W3C which is very involved. All the compatibility checkers show different things. Not sure how much loot everyone else is getting for this type of work, but the people I work with don't have the budget for what it seems like the value of this work is.
Is there more of a straightforward process to take with this? Kind of overwhelmed here at how to approach it. Need something more sensible and some advice.
My process has typically been, get color contrast straight, clean up some chunks of code that maybe aren't very semantic, run Axe Deque's Chrome extension to see what that pulls up, fix some stuff from that, do some manual checks and common sense checks, add a few aria labels, then run it through WAVE and circle back to Axe Deque to try and get it as close to 100%, check that tab key does something and arrow keys allow some functionality, and call it a day. Now, I am finding myself reviewing things in Windows High Contrast mode, pulling my hair out nitpicking how I am naming roles and labels, adding IBMs Accessibility Checker which seems even more stringent and shooting for 80-90% on that, really spending a lot of time with tabindex and :focus styles and then reading all sorts of contradictory stuff from one blog to the next. Now people want accessibility reports. Seems like everyone does something different and there is no standard other than W3C which is very involved. All the compatibility checkers show different things. Not sure how much loot everyone else is getting for this type of work, but the people I work with don't have the budget for what it seems like the value of this work is.
Is there more of a straightforward process to take with this? Kind of overwhelmed here at how to approach it. Need something more sensible and some advice.