GAAD (Global Accessibility Awareness Day) Foundation reposted this
Digital accessibility specialist (CPWA), (technical) writer, community manager, front-end engineer.
🔗 The value of component libraries that have accessibility ‘built in’ is both immense and often overstated. Two sides of the same coin: yes they're good, but yes it's also risky to say they are some sort of one size fits all solution. They're both a blessing and a curse (https://lnkd.in/ejG-FwUt). Michael Matthews at A11y Quest explains: “merely using an accessible library or framework doesn’t mean your team has somehow outsourced all its accessibility responsibilities” (From: The Myth of 'Accessible Components and Done' | A11y Quest https://lnkd.in/esdQRBN7) He goes on to say in addition to maybe benefitting from an accessible component library, you need to make informed decisions, test with users and ensure expertise within your team. Amen to that!
A component library can’t provide proper alt text on images or proper labels for buttons and links, or anything that is context dependent for that matter 😅 thinking your product is accessible just because you use a good library is a risky thing to relly on
So true! People seem surprised when accessibility issues are found when they use an accessible component library. As well as the content issues you still need to combine the components together to give an accessible experience. So I pitch our component library as “accessibility ready”rather than conformant. Plus I always highlight the high cost and risk of using inaccessible components. Frequently you can’t change the underlying code to fix issues or add attributes so it’s impossible to remove issues.
Ahhh yeah. So many people tend to think that „accessible design system” will solve all problems in their application. Well, accessible components can still be used / implemented in an inaccessible way.
Accessible component libraries are like solid bricks. You can still use them to build a poorly constructed house without proper architecture.
Fully agree! Also note that accessibility is sometimes used for marketing purposes - not all component libraries that claim to be accessible are thoroughly tested for accessibility.
So true! The component libraries need to be supplemented with guidance, instructions and expectations for various (if not all) use cases for each component. Quite crucial in enabling the whole team to make informed decisions with minimum scope of incorrect implementation.
This is so true. We got a lot of questions about a11y, and it was quite obvious that many of the people asking expected the answer to be: Yes, we've taken care of accessibility for you. So we started saying: the design system is "accessible ready". We've taken care of color contrast and made the button big enough for mobile. We've added aria attributes to the components. But you still need to add alt text to images. You need to think about keyboard navigation on every single screen you create. And so on.