Elegant Accessibility
summary
Argues that accessibility failures come from feature bloat, not lack of care: complex widgets (modals, accordions, carousels, address lookups, date pickers) hide content, force heavy ARIA and fragile focus management, and often fail users — tests show users ignore address lookups and 9/10 bypass complex controls; a McDonald’s UK landing page measured 5.9 MB. Advocates simple semantic HTML, the ARIA rule don't add ARIA unless necessary, and editorial restraint — use native semantics and say no to unnecessary components.
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chapters (20)
- 0:00Intro
- 2:17A Web Paradox
- 2:40Are We Caring Wrong?
- 3:26What Clients Says
- 4:31Make Something Functional
- 5:01Make Something ... Less Functional
- 6:23We Can Blame Accessibility
- 7:47Impolite Explanation
- 8:59The Solution...
- 9:29ARIA?
- 12:16Modal Dialogs
- 16:05ARIA Masks Bloat
- 17:47It Isn't Accessibility...
- 19:07It is bad UX
- 20:39Complexity Avoidance
- 23:52Beyond Conformance
- 26:50A Secret to Everyone
- 28:24Getting Meta
- 31:09The Best Solution
- 34:40Thank you
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