UI frameworks and accessibility

I’ve been a frontend developer for years but, honestly, I know nothing about web accessibility. That’s because of my past jobs: to spend time and money to make our product more accessible has never been an option, so I’ve never learned about it. To be honest, it wasn’t my employers/client’s fault too: often accessibility is considered a luxury more than an expression of civilization.

On the other hand, I’m a big advocate of UI frameworks: they allow me to draw from other developers’ work (and experience) and let me contribute to this collective effort, instead of “reinventing the wheel”. UI frameworks have many advantages over tailor-made solutions:

• they promote visual consistency over all the UIs;
• they let developers save time;
• they spare designers from having to make every little decision.

When developers don’t have experience nor time to spend on accessibility, UI frameworks can be a great solution to offer good support. Probably they’re a good choice in any case since they have been made by experts.

A few days ago I’ve found this interesting article by Darek Kay about the accessibility support in different UI frameworks: he defines his meter and ranks 27 frameworks by their score. The review criteria are limited but well defined, and I don’t think they need much development (though it would be interesting). Based on the rank you can see what frameworks perform better: sadly my favorite, Semantic UI, scores very badly.

Apart from the scores of those libraries, I think that this article raises questions: how will be ranked a custom solution, based on Darek’s ranking? If a small company can’t afford to hire an accessibility expert and act accordingly to his/her indications (spending a lot of time and money), how many users could benefit by using a UI framework? Can the benefits of using custom solutions justify leaving behind many people because of poor accessbility?

On a side note: this site is the first that need accessibility improvements; I hope I can learn something by working on it.

Original article:
https://darekkay.com/blog/accessible-ui-frameworks/

Darek Kay on Twitter:
https://twitter.com/darek_kay

Semantic UI:
https://semantic-ui.com/