accessibility-insights-web VS material-ui-docs

Hi Roy,

Thanks for sharing! I think it's great that more orgs/folks are trying to make the Web more accessible.

I'm also a web dev with some experience, and I've done a few accessibility projects, both in-house and with third-party consultants.

My main feedback is this: I would've loved to have been able to outsource to/partner up with experts for more of that work, but that would've been difficult at your prices. €2k-€4.5k/mo was between half and all of my salary as a full-time dev (working for small biz). On an ongoing basis, that would've been quite unaffordable.

If you're truly interested in making "accessibility achievable and affordable for organizations of any size", might you consider a pricing model where it's X dollars for the initial work (where the bulk of it lies, in terms of initial design/audit/etc.), and then a lower Y dollars/mo for maintenance (reviewing some new content and pages, etc.)? Possibly also some sort of allowance/sliding scale for smaller sites or smaller orgs?

In my experience, much of the work is frontloaded. Having to pay the same price month-to-month where subsequent months might not be much work at all is a tough sell. And in my experience, all-included subscription services like this often tend to be "best effort" anyway, especially for smaller customers who are competing for limited dev/design time with your bigger clients. At lower monthly costs, that's still a fair enough value proposition, but at four-figures a month... that's easily the territory where smaller companies might consider in-housing instead. And sure, people could subscribe for just a month or two and then cancel, but that feels disrespectful/dishonest.

In the past accessibility projects we've done, the upfront audits cost a few grand on a mid-sized site. We were presented with various reports and tables (several tens of pages worth), but it was really just a checklist of things we'd go down and address. The actual fixes took about a week of dev time. Then on an ongoing basis, we just followed the same recommendations for our new content, occasionally using free tools like Microsoft's free Accessibility Insights (https://accessibilityinsights.io/) to double-check our pages for problems. These days a lot of it is built into IDEs too.

That's not to say automated checklists are sufficient and can replace human expertise (yet), but they do take care of a lot of the low-hanging fruit, especially for ongoing content updates that follow the same format as previously audited pages/sites.

Now, the above was just my personal experience primarily working for small biz and nonprofits. If you're primarily targeting bigger enterprises or early 2020s-style startups with infinite money, and purposefully trying to exclude smaller customers, that's totally valid and maybe that pricing makes sense? (It's probably cheaper to them vs hiring AAA labor in-house). But for smaller orgs, your prices are often more than their entire website budget and nearly as much as an additional staff person. If you truly want to target them as well, would you consider something that's more suitable for their budgets?

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Altogether separate than the pricing thoughts: It would also be lovely to see some demo reports/audits, or before/after screenshots etc. This is the sort of endeavor where the quality of consulting/auditing can vary a lot between service providers, and being able to see examples of your previous work would mean a lot.

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Thanks again for sharing, and I hope this feedback wasn't too harsh! Just my 2¢ as someone who wishes more companies would voluntarily take this work on.

(I'm a frontend dev, but I came into the design side only later in my career, after having started as a full-stack programmer.)

I think this book is probably the single best resource I've seen on the topic: https://www.refactoringui.com/

It's a really easy-to-use format (one quick tip on each page, with clear examples).

It's from the people who made Tailwind, a CSS framework that's basically a reimagining of Bootcamp for the Javascript/component era.

Check out some of their templates: https://tailwindui.com/templates

These are lookalike "modern" designs that you can pay to use, or just draw inspiration from. Imitation == flattery and all that.

Along similar lines, check out the free Next.js templates: https://vercel.com/templates/next.js

If you want to build up from components instead, Tailwind offers a component library too: https://tailwindui.com/components

For React, I prefer the astoundingly good MUI framework (amazing components with lots of customizability, a good enough default look, and great documentation): https://mui.com/ If you end up going this route, using their Figma kit (https://mui.com/store/items/figma-react/) plus the Refactoring UI book from above should allow you to whip up a pretty standard-looking, "pretty enough" design in very little time. And then implementing it using the actual MUI lib would just take a few days.

There's also Ant Design: https://ant.design/

And Chakra UI: https://chakra-ui.com/

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For more theoretical stuff (i.e., less visual but still very valuable), the UX research group Nielsen Norman still has a treasure trove of valuable advice: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/top-ten-guidelines-for-home...

You should know the basics of accessibility (beyond general usability, this alos means alt text, header levels, contrast ratios, readability, screen readers, keyboard navigation, special considerations for the hard of sight and hearing, etc.): https://www.w3.org/WAI/standards-guidelines/wcag/ or at least use an easy checklist tool like Microsoft's WCAG analyzer: https://accessibilityinsights.io/

Microsoft makes a very helpful Chrome and Edge plug-in that checks your site against WCAG 2.1 AA recommendations. Run it and fix the issues one by one and you're like 80% of the way there.

https://accessibilityinsights.io/

The other 20% is often like judgment calls on navigability and readability on screen readers. You can install one (or several) and try to navigate your site and menus using them. They are often free, especially the ones built into major operating systems.

If you just go down the checklist and do what you can, you'll be way ahead of most websites: https://webaim.org/standards/wcag/checklist

Microsoft also has a great interactive test that can probe your website for you and highlight issues: https://accessibilityinsights.io/

I think similar but less powerful checks are also built into some IDEs (Jetbrains) and linters (Eslint).

I really like the suggestions from other commenters here, WAVE, Axe, and Google Lighthouse are great automated tools. I'd also recommend SiteImprove and Microsoft's Accessibility Insights for their automated offerings. I have some further suggestions should you also want to go deeper into learning and addressing accessibility best practices.

Accessibility Insights Accessibility Insights is a free, open-source tool from Microsoft that allows you to test the accessibility of your website. The tool can be used as a browser extension or integrated into your testing framework. Accessibility Insights provides automated testing and manual testing features to help you identify accessibility issues on your website.

Accessibility Insights from Microsoft

Accessibility Insights - Tool to test accessibility from Microsoft (free)

Chrome Devtools is a great one to use for testing, I'm also really fond of Siteimprove and Accessibility Insights too. I'd also urge you to try a bit of manual testing as well, for example I noticed I was unable to effectively navigate using keyboard alone because I couldn't easily tell what links had focus when I hit the tab key. This article Focus management and inert is a great primer on the subject.

I'll be using Material UI for styling the cards. You can install it by visiting the Material UI installation guide.

For the UI, MUI is a huge time saver. It's open-core and thoroughly excellent: https://mui.com/

They also have a lot of pre-built dashboards that tie into various cloud vendors (typically not FOSS though).

(My opinion only, please treat it as just one person's thought process, not some eternal truth)

As a frontend dev, for me it's primarily just an ecosystem thing. There's nothing wrong with HTMX or any other solution, like Ruby on Rails or Hotwire or even other JS frameworks like Angular or Gatsby, but they are not really what I see in the majority of the web dev ecosystem.

By ecosystem, I mean this:

- Developers are easy to find & hire for, and can work on existing code without much training because there are (relatively) standardized practices

- For any common problem, I can easily reuse (or at least learn from the source for) a package on NPM

- For any uncommon problem, I can find multiple robust discussion about it on various forums, Stack, etc. And ChatGPT probably has a workable overview.

- I can reasonably expect medium-term robust vendor support, not just from the framework developers but various hosts, third-party commercial offerings (routers, state management, UI libs, CMSes, etc.), i.e., it's going to stay a viable ecosystem for 3-5 years at least

- I don't have to reinvent the wheel for every new project / client, and can spin up a working prototype in a few minutes using boilerplates and 1-click deploys

I've been building websites since I was a kid some 30 years ago, first using Perl and cgi-bin and then PHP, and evolved my stack with it over time.

I've never been as productive as I am in the modern React ecosystem, especially with Next or Vite + MUI (https://mui.com/). Primarily this is because it allows me to build on top of other people's work and spend time only on the business logic of my app, at a very high level of abstraction (business components) and with a very high likelihood of being able find drop-in solutions for most common needs. I'm not reinventing the wheel constantly, or dealing with low-level constructs like manually updating the DOM. Or worse, dealing with server issues or updating OS packages.

What used to take days/weeks of setup now takes one click and two minutes, and I can have a useable prototype up in 2-3 hours. Because 95%+ of my codebase isn't mine anymore; I can just reuse what someone else built, and then reframe it for my own needs. And when someone else needs to continue the work, they can just pick up where I left off with minimal onboarding, because they probably already have React knowledge.

I think React, for all its faults, has just reached a point of saturation where it's like the old "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM", i.e., it's a safe, proven bet for most use cases. It may or may not be the BEST bet for any project, but it's probably good enough that it would at least warrant consideration, especially if the other stacks have less community/ecosystem support.

Explore Material UI: Material UI Documentation

- UI kit (I personally have good experience with React Material UI - https://mui.com/; there is also https://tanstack.com/)

the network is settled (I got the code from some discussion group). But nothing works. Playwright has also

page.waitForLoadState({ waitUntil: "domcontentloaded" }); etc.

but they are not working for my test cases.

2)

I have noticed that https://mui.com/ have dropdown menus, which implementation is far from normal html option. Mui uses some kind

MUI | Remote UTC-6 to +5 | Multiple roles | Full time | https://mui.com/

I'm a co-founder and the CEO of MUI. Our objective in the short term is to become the UI toolkit for React, unifying the fragmented ecosystem of dependencies into a single set of simple, beautiful, consistent, and accessible React components. In the longer term, our goal is to make building great web UIs quicker, simpler, and accessible to more people through a low-code platform for developers.

Some things we’re proud of:

- 25% of the downloads that React receives.

- 1M developers on our documentation every month.

- Solid financials: profitable

If this sounds interesting to you, we are hiring for: UI Engineers, Product Engineers, Developer Advocate / Content Engineer:

Here, at Woovi, our design system has been wrote using [MUI](https://mui.com/. But, in my opinion, I have some pain points considering how MUI built their components, most focusing on the fact of how they expose their component APIs and how they handle the component structure.

My feeling as a frontend dev was that Material Design You is just run of the mill enshittification at Google. Around the time that came out, Google also started to hide more buttons in the UI, made the drop down shade much more clumsy, got rid of the excellent Pixel fingerprint scanner, etc.

It felt to me like some other busy body design team had to show innovation and so made Material You adopt your wallpaper colors (in some ugly variation). It was like the MySpaceification of Android.

Material Design spawned some of my favorite projects, like MUI: https://mui.com/

That tracks Material v2 (pre you) and IMO is the best web UI currently available. There's some tentative work on adding Material You, but I hope they don't. It's a step backward IMO, form over function and against the original spirit of Material as a usability design library. https://github.com/mui/material-ui/issues/29345

5.material-ui