Accessibility for Everyone

Over the past several years I’ve made accessibility and ensuring the things I build work for everyone a huge part of my work life. I’ve slowly read more, gotten more acquainted with it, and tried hard to ensure that the things I have a hand in building are accessible. So I was excited when A Book Apart released Accessibility for Everyone by Laura Kalbag.

If you are new to accessibility or thinking about how to design inclusively, this is the book for you. It’s a great overview of the whys and the hows to getting started with accessibility. And to be quite honest, the resources section at the back is amazing and I know I’ll be referring to it often.

I do wish there had been a few more citations for some of the information stated, in particular the section that talked about skip links was something I’d never read anywhere else and not having anything cited for more information was a bit disappointing. I do realize these are short books and introductions, but I think having some links to get more information on various reasons would’ve been helpful at times. (And I’m going to dig into the resources section more closely to see if I can find out more about the reasoning provided for skip links.)

But, as is typical and wonderful in ABA books, this is a short, wonderful read and worth it if you want to learn more about accessibility (which we all should) and incorporate into your day to day work on the web.

And I agree with Kalbag’s final wish at the end of the book:

My one wish for the web is that people consider accessibility in the same way they think about web performance. The performance implications of a new tool or technique are always mentioned in blog posts and articles. Wouldn’t it be great if the same were true for accessibility?