Re:Colleges improve website accessibility as they are defend...
by bobthepanda on Thursday June 20, 2019 @06:27PM
(#20238043)
IMO the problem is that web development education is often very informal, if not just straight up on the job. A lot of accessibility is to make links <a>, buttons <button>, tables <table>, lists <ul> or <ol>, etc. Append alt text as needed.
The problems come up when people see default <button> styling and then go off and make it a <div> instead. Nobody really teaches why this is a bad thing, you certainly won't find it in some random web tutorial on a blog from Google search. But if enough kludges like this happens in a code base it becomes pervasive tech debt in lots of tiny places, which is possibly the worst kind of tech debt.
I don't think it's impossible to educate engineers to do this, the problem is that we don't really educate about web development in the first place.
The problems come up when people see default <button> styling and then go off and make it a <div> instead. Nobody really teaches why this is a bad thing, you certainly won't find it in some random web tutorial on a blog from Google search. But if enough kludges like this happens in a code base it becomes pervasive tech debt in lots of tiny places, which is possibly the worst kind of tech debt.
I don't think it's impossible to educate engineers to do this, the problem is that we don't really educate about web development in the first place.