This past month I have been working as a web development assistant with the Minisitry of Transporation. A lot of my work as been about web accessibility.

Web accessibility is the idea of making websites easier to use for people with disabilities such as vision impairment or color blindness. This involves have alternative text tags for images, having proper header and title formatting and proper color contrast on pages.

As a self-taught web developer, accessibility is an interesting thing. In all the time that I was learning web development, the idea of accessibility was never mentioned. It never occurred to me that people did not necessarily experience websites the same way as me. For example, while I could easily look at an image with text and read it, someone with vision impairment, would not see that images and thus would a description of what the image contains.

Thinking of it that way, it becomes quite clear that accessibility is important. But for a lot of people, accessibility seems like a burden. It adds a ton of work that they need to do to a web page for something that has no direct benefit to them.

But - as a coworker explained to me - accessibility is not something that we do for a small select group; its something that benefits everyone. For example, think about how a bus announces each new stop along with having a sign. This obviously helps that vision impaired but it also helps everyone else. Even if you are distracted and not looking at the sign, you will still hear when your stop arrives.

Similarly, web accessibility helps everyone. It makes web pages more structured and layouts easier to understand. Furthermore, even if you do not require accessibility as of now, in the future you might require accessible features.

Which is why I think all developers should put accessibility at the for front of their minds when they are creating and editing websites.