Accessibility Matters: A Developer's Responsibility

I used to think accessibility was someone else's problem. I'd add alt text to images sometimes, make sure my colors had contrast, but I didn't really think about it. Then I watched someone use a screen reader to navigate a website, and I realized how much I'd been missing.

The site I'd built was nearly unusable. Links that said "click here" with no context. Forms with no labels. Buttons that were just icons with no text. It worked fine for me, but I wasn't the only user.

That demo changed how I thought about accessibility. It wasn't about checking boxes or following rules. It was about making things usable for everyone. I started testing my sites with a screen reader. At first, it was frustrating. Everything was broken. But fixing those issues made the sites better for everyone, not just screen reader users.

Semantic HTML matters. Using the right elements—<nav>, <main>, <article>—gives screen readers structure. It's not just about divs and spans. Keyboard navigation is crucial. Can someone use your site without a mouse? If not, you're excluding people. Testing with just a keyboard revealed issues I'd never noticed. Color contrast isn't optional. Text that's hard to read is text that doesn't get read. And it's not just about accessibility—it's about usability for everyone.

I'm still learning. I make mistakes. I miss things. But I'm trying, and that's what matters. Every project, I think about accessibility from the start instead of adding it at the end.

Accessibility isn't a feature you add. It's how you build. And when you build with accessibility in mind, you build better products for everyone.

---

Note: This is a mock-up post created as part of the Feather blog template demonstration. The content is provided as an example to showcase the blog's features including markdown rendering, search functionality, tags, and more.

Feather is a blog template built for Next.js. You can use these example posts as a reference when creating your own content.