Currently, the company has several incorrect ideas about how web accessibility is supposed to work. These range from misunderstanding WCAG guidelines to viewing accessibility and usability as separate things. Unfortunately, SE are practically experts relative to the rest of the industry. This stuff is not well-documented. This makes it difficult for me to recommend (what I believe would be) the single most effective intervention to improve UI, design, and UX: "learn the basic principles of web accessibility".
So I'll repeat my suggestion for the Community-a-thon: please participate in Q&A about accessible web development practices. This solves three problems:
- It lets you ask "stupid questions", to be answered by whoever has relevant expertise. Stack Overflow loves questions like these, provided that they're not too broad. We'll have no way to distinguish ignorance from thoroughness. You can even self-answer them, where you're confident.
- It gives us insight into the state of the company's understanding of design and accessibility, beyond what precious fragments we can glimpse from public communications. This will make it easier to identify why you're doing particular things (which may not actually be mistakes after all!), improving company-community communications for the future.
- It means there'll actually be a reliable, vaguely-comprehensive repository of accessibility-related information, something we're sorely lacking at present. Being able to point other people at a Stack Overflow question to say "here is what you should be doing instead of what you are doing" would be so much easier than having to write two paragraphs of explanation cross-referencing three sections of WCAG and a handful of blog posts (yes, these are the experts, no I can't prove that, but they are: that snake-oil vendor is lying to you).
I understand that this is an unorthodox suggestion: after all, sprints are usually about concrete features! But without an understanding of accessible design, your attempts to improve things could easily make things worse.
Take blockquotes. These used to have a coloured background (dark-grey or yellow, depending on theme), but this was changed to a white background to improve text contrast. But this made it harder for users to distinguish quotes from the surrounding text! So to fix this, the text was made light-grey… reducing the text contrast. So now blockquotes are still quite hard to distinguish from the rest of a post, and they're hard to read: strictly-worse than the old black-on-yellow colour scheme!
That kind of thing will keep happening everywhere until you understand accessible design. Nobody has the bandwidth to try to negotiate fixes for every design issue on a case-by-case basis, especially when they interfere with the coherence of the design system. So let us teach you the principles, so we can stop micromanaging, and let you do your jobs!
This proposal applies double to dev-related accessibility concerns, such as how to lay out the DOM or how to make decisions about client-side versus server-side; but it's hard to motivate those to a non-developer. I personally think those are more important than such trifling concerns as which pixels get painted what colour on the average user's screen.
on any post one has flagged.
