Accessibility on the Web is a topic that many people mentioned over and over and over. Been wanting to go with this topic in any direction, but I’m a bit ashamed to do so, because even though I’m a web designer/developer as a trade skill, I never gave too much attention to this particular part of web design. And that’s caused mostly because of the lack of education by me or my customers. It’s no one’s fault, after all, no one is born with an encyclopaedia in their head. It’s just something I kept overlooking, and in more than the literal sense of the term “web accessibility” of “designing and developing websites, tools, and technologies so that people with disabilities can use them”. As a developer, you need to make sure that your projects not only look good, but also that they are built in a way that they can be reached by as many people as possible. During these last days, I’ve read and learned a lot and it made me expand a bit my technical borders.

Taking the idea proposed by orchids for March’s IndieWeb Carnival as a personal challenge, I started to research the big gaps I had in terms of web accessibility and feel nice about the things that, mostly without my knowledge, were done properly in the first place. There’s has been some code editing under the hood to improve the accessibility of the site for disabled people, but it’s an ongoing process that will probably take some time. I moved some code around to make the site easier to be navigated using the mouse and keyboard, to add some aria-label tags for the site to be better processed by screen reader softwares.

But then I hit a wall. Or, actually, the wall hit me.

The word of the 2020s decade is probably “SNAFU”. We live in a shit world, confirmed by the countless wars happening all over the Earth, the injustices, famines, diseases, global warming, corporations taking over governments, our entire lives slowly turning into dystopia. The human species is probably at its most extremist stage in its history, and some people would have it better in the biblical hell than in what they’re living now.

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So it’s no wonder when we look around and we see the gap getting wider and wider. The gap between the rich and the poor, between healthy and sick, between love and hate.

The world (and the World Wide Web) is trying is the present to be more friendly, more inclusive, where everyone is welcome, and anyone has a place, regardless of race, gender, nationality, age, education, or ice cream flavor preference. In theory, it’s a good thing, but sometimes the road to hell is paved with good intentions because this “welcome” starts to transform day after day into something darker, curated and corporate-approved. In 2024, access to information should be a fundamental right of every living person, but unfortunately, in the virtue of the times we’re living, Internet access is scarce, limited, filtered and censored and people are discriminated on literally any factor possible.

So while I’m going miles away from the initial idea of the article and without trying to turn this into a manifesto, I’m understanding that we need a change of perspective. We need to stop expecting it to come from Meta/Google/Apple/Moneysoft, and take the reins of the destiny of the Internet we want. It needs to start with the things that we, as a collective, can control, with the places that we created, that we own, that we maintain, that we are curating.

While I’m not trying to write the ten Commandments of web development, these are some good tips and directions that I try to respect myself when developing something.

• Make your website readable. I know that many website owners that adopt the “web 1.0 revival” ideology go bezerk with the design. A myriad of sparkling texts, animated gifs, layouts exploding all over the place. If you like it like this, it’s fine. After all, your creativity is the limit, but give users the option to turn them off, or at least to tune them down. Don’t use things that might trigger seizures, like flashing screens. Offer a plain text alternative or an RSS feed. Don’t use nag screens unless your site is adults-only, not for shit like “subscribe to our newsletter” or to ask for cookies consent. Which brings me to the next point:
• Make your website anonymous. Don’t fucking track your visitors if you want them to keep coming back at you. Use cookies only and only if necessary. If you want to store browser settings, use LocalStorage.
• Make your website lightweight. Don’t load hundreds of megabytes of useless scripts, don’t send me the entire npm library in a minified request. I mean, look at this list of Javascript bloat. A small footprint helps a lot users with low end hardware, or coming from countries where broadband is scarce. Don’t upload 50MB photos. Resize and recompress photos, but don’t use webp, that’s a proprietary trap.
• Make your website reachable. Don’t block Chinese IPs because Winnie the Pooh is bad. Don’t block US IPs either, just because they’re capitalists. Don’t make me have to jump through hoops and hurdles to get to your content, or I will go away. Tor is the only allowed exception. If you do have to block content for a certain group of people, at least be transparent and say why you do it, not just show an “Access Denied” message just because you can’t be bothered to implement a cookie consent popup

• Make your website accessible. Some people are physically impaired and already have a very hard time being on the internet, don’t alienate them. Make sure your website is a place where information flows, not a place where the reader needs to have Platinum-League Counter-Strike reflexes to click three links. Make sure your website can be properly read out loud by a screen reader. Show your website to your niece, your mother and/or your grandfather, see if they get lost. Put a fucking blindfold and try to navigate your site, the one you know best on the internet using only a keyboard and a screen reader. If you need help, there is a good starting point, mentioning 4 of the most overlooked web accessibility issues. The page Web Accessibility on Wikipedia is also a good starting point.
• Make your website yours. Write for people, not for search engines. Be empathic of the people around you and the people that might read you. Dare to be yourself, decorate it how you like, use whatever page structure you want. Advertise the causes you support by putting a pixel at the end of the footer, by putting a comment in the code, by having a banner cover 80% of your homepage. Support anyone you consider is worth supporting, but remember that at the end of the day we are all humans. If your website is used just to spread hate towards someone else, just do something else, like gardening.

In the end, as a conclusion, I know that many adopters of the “revival web” really put a lot of effort into their quirky, creative, unique and special sites. I love them, many are actually masterpieces, but we need to understand that sometimes the internet is more important in the form of a stinky shit than the shiny pretty box it comes in.

So take a good look at your website, put yourself in the torn (or missing shoes) of someone that might be interested in your content and think how easy (or hard) it is for them to reach you and your message.

Look, I know I’m not perfect, but I strive to improve and I think that’s a good goal, try to do the same. And I’m not telling you to dumb down your website or to remove all CSS and Javascript. But if you want a free Internet, make sure you’re not building gates in the places where you should have been building bridges.

Love, Andrei.