Web Accessibility: Buzzword or Reality?

Web Accessibility. The unexpected lovechild of Sir Tim Berners Lee, a shoddy 12" monochrome screen that went black (and never came back) and a cat that ran away with the mouse. The cat came back, but by the time we found the mouse again, Steve Jobs decided we should all be poking at our screens instead.

Rewind to August 6, 1991 — which to the snowflake generation may seem like ages ago, except it wasn’t — a mere 27 years ago, when the first web page went live, that web page was accessible. Its syntax was semantically correct, all of its content was in the DOM, it was readable by colour-blind people, dyslexics, 20–20 vision, poor vision or no vision individuals alike. It was keyboard navigable and its logical flow was from top to bottom, left to right. The only error on that page was and still is, the missing lang attribute, which came with HTML 4.01 in 1999, making this relic by today’s standards (Lighthouse audit, AXE under the hood) an 88% accessible page.

Read the full article on HackerNoon.