Links

I completely agree with the author of this post that there is definitely a lot of hostility toward beginners in the tech community. However, there are absolutely times when RTFM is not only appropriate, but necessary. Take, for example, developers and accessibility, specifically semantic markup. At a certain point, developers should be taking on the responsibility of learning how to write code that runs in browsers which adheres to web standards. Another example: It’s not the job of accessibility practitioners to fix the resultant problems when standards-compliant code isn’t deployed, and it’s not our job to whip up complex yet accessible components to submit as pull requests for every open source project on the internet. At some point, developeres need to learn to do their jobs, and sometimes RTFM is the only way to get that point across. You literally cannot make things accessible without being able to consult documentation on the subject, especially when you’re starting out. You must learn how to research so you can get to a point where you can ask the appropriate questions and then work on implementing a solution. RTFM or similar isn’t appropriate when someone indicates they’ve tried to find the answer on their own and they are stuck. It’s not appropriate on the first day of class. But to say that we should throw it out completely ignores the reality that for things like accessibility or learning a programming language, reading the documentation is a necessary component of that process. It ignores the reality that, in cases where people with disabilities are asked to do the heavy lifting, (accessibility work, for example), there’s a very likely possibility that people with disabilities, who already have to deal with the consequences of developers and designers breaking things, are then tasked with ensuring that they are fixed, by spoonfeeding if necessary, and very often, for free. That is very tiring work, and there comes a point where asking people with disabilities to be compassionate to designers and developers becomes an effort that does not produce results, wastes time and energy, and creates situations where all that work will have to be done, again.

Some interesting analysis on the technical side of the actual file, not the report itself. Thus endeth the only comments I’ll make publicly on the report or its fall-out.

Definitely worth a read and ponder.

Link text which makes sense out of context is often cited as an accessibility concern. It’s not only an accessibility concern, it’s also beneficial for the people in your audience who do not have a disability of any kind. Like several of the other things which are primarily accessibility concerns but which also end up benefiting the rest of your audience, (captions for videos, transcription for audio, heading structure of your website as a whole and each piece of your content separately, just to name a few), it turns out that link text which can be made sense of out of context by assistive technology users are also a great way to increase clicks generally. Most people do not read an entire page on the web. They scan it instead, so links that make sense out of context, along with being distinguishable in othere ways from the rest of the text, (underlining links, anyone)? are more likely to capture the attention of your visitors than are links which have vague or repetative text as their label. I will note that you can’t take advantage of any of these benefits if your primary platform for content distribution is a social media presence as opposed to a website you own and control. (Indieweb for the win, again).

So, score one more for accessibility benefiting everyone. And, if you’re not doing so already, spend some time putting some thought into your link text. If you’re using social media as your personal or professional home on the web, here’s one more reason to consider either starting your own website, or hiring someone to build one for you.

This piece by Joe Dolson (@Joedolson on Twitter) is a pretty good run-down of the disadvantages and general lack of helpfulness an accessibility toolbar provides to any website. Don’t Recreate Browser Features by Adrian Roselli is also another good resource on the topic. I have to concur with Joe’s post, specifically the commentary on how absolutely useless these kinds of toolbars are for people who actually need accessibility. I never use them when I encounter them in the wild, and I’ve never met a person with disabilities who clammors for them, either personally or professionally. I do recognize, however, that, most of the time, they’re installed as a result of the intention to make a site accessible, so I try to balance taking into consideration the good intentions of others with the fact that accessibility toolbars aren’t helpful when it comes to educating others.