Once I suggested we get a partially sighted person help with recommendations for clients, the goal was to get more business in as a client might need a site rebuild if it is deemed bad on the accessibility front.
I explained how Google rank according to accessibility and how GoogleBot is the biggest 'screen reader' there is, so accessibility should be part of the SEO sales pitch.
The men in white coats from the local mental health hospital did not come and collect me but I did feel that this was the expectation, particularly for suggesting we bring a partially sighted person into the process.
The web is hampered by a visual design process that was necessary a decade ago when you did need to know what you were doing with non-standards-compliant browsers. However, a whole industry has built up around this process and mockups are never made from simple HTML documents structured with semantic HTML elements such as 'aside', 'section', 'article', 'nav' and so forth. What emerges from a visual design process always gets coded up with some allegedly 'agile' process with many 'div' elements and maybe a 'header' element thrown into the mix because someone on the SEO team has demanded it for SEO.
Fundamentally it is this visual led design process rather than mocking up the content with semantic HTML that is getting the div soup industry into this accessibility problem. If you mark up a document with the proper HTML tags and put it through the WAVE tool then it comes up good.
For instance, rather than using 'div' containers for images, if you use 'figure' then you can add a 'figcaption' in there. The 'figcaption' can describe the picture, e.g. 'my cats dinner' and the 'alt' tag on the img can be 'messy bowl with prawns in it'. In this way you can have 'what it is' and 'what it looks like'. What is there not to like from a SEO perspective? Never mind accessibility!
I hope that the work Google are doing with Lighthouse that flags accessibility can be brought in to actively down-rank websites that fail on this metric, with an upranking for HTML5 semantic usage where there is document structure instead of divs bloated with class tags from lame frameworks.
I explained how Google rank according to accessibility and how GoogleBot is the biggest 'screen reader' there is, so accessibility should be part of the SEO sales pitch.
The men in white coats from the local mental health hospital did not come and collect me but I did feel that this was the expectation, particularly for suggesting we bring a partially sighted person into the process.
The web is hampered by a visual design process that was necessary a decade ago when you did need to know what you were doing with non-standards-compliant browsers. However, a whole industry has built up around this process and mockups are never made from simple HTML documents structured with semantic HTML elements such as 'aside', 'section', 'article', 'nav' and so forth. What emerges from a visual design process always gets coded up with some allegedly 'agile' process with many 'div' elements and maybe a 'header' element thrown into the mix because someone on the SEO team has demanded it for SEO.
Fundamentally it is this visual led design process rather than mocking up the content with semantic HTML that is getting the div soup industry into this accessibility problem. If you mark up a document with the proper HTML tags and put it through the WAVE tool then it comes up good.
For instance, rather than using 'div' containers for images, if you use 'figure' then you can add a 'figcaption' in there. The 'figcaption' can describe the picture, e.g. 'my cats dinner' and the 'alt' tag on the img can be 'messy bowl with prawns in it'. In this way you can have 'what it is' and 'what it looks like'. What is there not to like from a SEO perspective? Never mind accessibility!
I hope that the work Google are doing with Lighthouse that flags accessibility can be brought in to actively down-rank websites that fail on this metric, with an upranking for HTML5 semantic usage where there is document structure instead of divs bloated with class tags from lame frameworks.