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by dccoolgai 2611 days ago
Even for internal apps, it might pay to think about accessibility... e.g. imagine someone who got hired to use the "internal app" was a Marine vet who lost vision to an IED or something... if your company is following the law, you have to provide the same opportunity for him to work there and use that "internal" app as everyone else. Maybe there's some reason why that would never be the case, but devs tend to think of the issue of accessibility much too narrowly.
2 comments

Thats not entirely accurate. The ADA requires reasonable accommodations, not "the same opportunity". Wether or not making an internal webapp more accessible is reasonable will depend on a lot of other factors.

However, I agree that generally speaking designing your apps to be accessible from the beginning is the right thing to do, and generally results in an easier to use interface for everyone!

I was considering more "good faith effort" w.r.t. https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/types/disability.cfm but tbh I wish devs would just do the right thing more and less pretend to be lawyers to get away with doing as little as they can to make usable things.
We need easily accessible tools. I used to ignore mobile viewport sizes. Now Chrome has button to emulate smartphone or iPad. I can check my web page with a single click. So I often spend a bit of time to ensure that it at least works good enough in mobile. I did not see anything comparable for blind users. If Chrome developers would add something similar to their developer console, I bet, a lot of new pages will be checked.