Accessibility-insights-web Alternatives

accessibility-insights-web reviews and mentions

• Show HN: Accessibility Aid – Fixed Price WCAG and ADA Compliance
  1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 5 Mar 2024

  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?

  ---

  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.

  ---

  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.

• Ask HN: Examples of best practice modern website design?
  5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 17 Dec 2023

  (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/

  -----------

  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/

• Ask HN: Best Practices for Accessible Websites
  2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 3 Nov 2023

  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.

• A11y Is Not Accessible
  1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 24 Oct 2023

  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).

• ADA Compliance tools
  2 projects | /r/webdev | 9 Jun 2023

  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.

• Is siteimprove legit?
  2 projects | /r/accessibility | 4 May 2023
• Unlocking Web Accessibility: Tips for Developers
  1 project | dev.to | 22 Mar 2023

  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.

• How to test student work for accessibility?
  1 project | /r/webaccess | 20 Mar 2023

  Accessibility Insights from Microsoft

• Don't overlook accessibility: Why it's crucial for website development
  2 projects | dev.to | 22 Jan 2023

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

• I made a website which features positive/inspiring news stories with no ads!
  2 projects | /r/InternetIsBeautiful | 5 Dec 2022

  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.

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