Vasilis van Gemert is een webdesigner en docent aan de Hogeschool van Amsterdam voor Communication and Multimedia Design. Hij staat bekend om zijn directe aanpak waarbij 'onzin' geen plaats heeft in zijn werk. Hij blijft experimenteren met toegankelijkheidsopties en het maximaliseren van hun potentieel.
The most important tool is that you have to design; especially developers, because they just want to develop. There are many things that many people don't think about, that a developer can think about very carefully. There are things that developers can quickly see that someone hasn't thought of.
All websites must be accessible by law. It must comply with the WCAG: Web Content Accessibility Guide. 99% of websites contain invalid HTML, so almost all WebDevs do not understand semantics, but still call themselves developers.
How do you really check whether a website is accessible?
There are different types of screen readers and not all of them do the same thing. Try to use several to get a good idea of how accessible your website is;
By zooming in and out to values like 200-500%, you really get a good idea of how good the site's scalability is.
There's a handful of accessibility tools out there, but some of them operate on a score-only basis. This means that people check if they get a high number and if they do, they're satisfied. But this does not give you any insight into how accessible your website really is, and often time, people use these score-only websites just so they can meet the bare-minimum of the WCAG, if even that.
I've used tools like Lighthouse out of curiosity before, but I always felt like it was inaccurate, especially after the 'shitty website' exercise, where I got a really high score. It clicked for me then. It is inaccurate. It is score only. When Vasilis explained this it really put into perspective for me why so much of the web is inaccessible. People don't bother to learn and it is a shame. It was good to hear from someone as deeply learned about the importance of accessibility as Vasilis what is and what isn't a good way to evaluate the accessibility of your site. I've got some of these extensions downloaded, to have on hand when I'm next trying to develop something new. He also showed us how some of these work, which was really insightful.