[didgeoridoo]

...although you can do a damn good job addressing most of them with a few simple things:

-Write good, semantic HTML, and use alt tags correctly

-Don't overwrite browser defaults for scrolling, tabbing, etc (even if it's "hot design")

-Don't rely purely on color to convey information

-Use ARIA attributes where you can if you're building an application

Some harder stuff that is really still worth it:

-Send your media out for subtitling/transcription (remarkably inexpensive)

-Actually test your site with some disabled individuals, or at least have a go yourself with the NoCoffee Chrome extension to simulate certain visual difficulties

[dominicgs]

A terrible example of relying on colour includes the braille at some Melbourne train stations[1]. It appears that someone directly translated the phrase "Press green button" rather than using left or right.

[1] http://wongm.com/2014/06/asking-vision-impaired-to-push-gree...

[greenyoda]

And it's not just blind people who can't differentiate between red and green. A significant percentage of the population has red-green color blindness.

[dllthomas]

Yes, but forgetting that is a less glaring (and therefore less amusing) error than writing "press the green button" in braille...

[pascalo]

Good you mention application and ARIA ... I've just come out of a project where the initial brief completely disregarded anything in terms of accessibility.

Full on angular app, no native forms or form elements (because they "look ugly" apparently).

Then the ultimate end client wants to go live but forgot to mention they had a mandatory accessibility audit.

So I've spent quite a bit of time working out how to make things work for screen readers using the ARIA specs. And it really worked quite well. My takeaway from this is to make sure everything is working with the keyboard correctly, spend some time thinking about tabindex, labels etc, and where I can push back requests to get rid of native browser elements.

[EnderMB]

Out of interest, did you do any user testing for this site? I've worked on sites that have required a legal accessibility audit and in my experience a lot of screen readers don't even know what ARIA is, let alone use it. Like users that stick with older browsers a number of users use old screen reading tools.

[pascalo]

Unfortunately there wasn't much budget for anything beyond the build. But the accessibility audit was lead by visually impaired people, and they did suggest what the benchmark was I had to meet and we iterated over that by me making changes and them flagging up what else needed to be done.

I also have the impression that there are quite a few people with older browsers out there because of the screen reader setup, and I don't think that's a good thing, but maybe it's a matter of doing what we're doing to older browsers in general: phase out support.

[vacri]

Don't rely purely on color to convey information

And, conversely, don't submit to the current fad of low-contrast grayscale.

[collyw]

Don't worry, my non-technical management have turned our in house app into a rainbow colored mess. Its ugly, but it does convey information quickly