[lone_haxx0r]

> Crafting semantic HTML markup with a strong focus on accessibility, in order to make experiences that are friendly to browsers, assistive technologies, search engines, and other environments that can consume HTML.

> Creating CSS code that control the look and feel of the web experience, tackling colors, typography, responsive layout, animation, and any other visual aspect of the UI. Frontend designers architect resilient CSS code with a focus on modularity, flexibility, compatibility, and extensibility.

> Optimizing the performance of frontend code in order to create lightweight, fast-loading, snappy, jank-free experiences.

I can't help but chuckle at this. I admit that good frontend designers do this, but they are extremely rare. Judging solely by the top Google results, 95% of frontend designers don't do any of this: they don't care about accesibility, friendly experience, compatibility or anything like that.

I applaud the author for caring about these things. His website is the biggest evidence that he does, but most designers don't do these things.

[ericmcer]

How many of us get to walk into green field projects or even decently architected projects? Accessibility isn’t too hard if you build conventions around doing it from the first commit, but adding aria tags and labels to 100s of old files is going to be a massive undertaking that few product managers will sign off on. I think it is less incompetence and more when it comes down to the wire, those are the first things to get cut or ignored.

[erikpukinskis]

It doesn’t really matter what’s there already. If your job this week is to add a new feature, spend some time this week thinking about accessibility. If you’re just fixing something old, then don’t worry about it.

I’m not even going to be prescriptive about how much time. If you have 5 minutes, fine, good.

[bobthepanda]

The problem is that anyone can pick up design and web dev and get up and running fairly quickly, but very few intro tutorials even touch accessibility or get into it. Therefore beginners easily wind up doing things like using links or divs instead of buttons because buttons look bad by default, instead of overriding button css.

And then usually you pile up thousands of kludges before someone blows a whistle and says “Hey, none of this is accessible!”, and then you look back at a mountain of inaccessible garbage you wrote and claim it’s too hard.

So long as design and webdev are learned informally, this will always be an issue. Especially because unless you yourself need the assistance of accessibility software, it’s not obvious that things are broken, because they look good.

As an aside, I also feel like this is because webdev and design are taken less seriously by the world of programming. My college offered only one course on webdev and it mostly involved teaching PHP and jQuery. So no one takes it seriously and then they half-ass learning it.

[dentemple]

It's not that 95% of frontend designers don't care about accessibility...

It's that 95% of project managers just won't place accessibility concerns on the top of their Jira backlogs.

It took me six years of full-time and freelancing work to finally end up a company that does this. It's a rare thing in the industry to find a company that cares about, what is essentially, this usually untapped source of potential revenue.

[tenaciousDaniel]

Hell, a good portion front-end developers don't even care about those things.