Everyday on Twitter, I get swamped with tweets about new web technology, new techniques, how to build flashy layouts etc. While it’s great that there are so many exciting things happening, I find that fundamentals like accessibility, performance and progressive enhancements often get forgotten and lost. In fact, they are things we should always be considering. Yes, to do a superb job in these areas can require a bit of work, but there are definitely a lot of simple things we can do to make a difference:
- Consider semantics and use the correct HTML tags
- Use ARIA landmark roles
- Consider what content the screen readers will read out: will you need to hide content offscreen so what gets read out will make more sense to screen reader users?
- Have a fallback for when JavaScript is disabled. Admittedly not all no-JavaScript fallback solutions are easy to implement, but simple things like ensuring content is displayed when JavaScript is disabled can be done quite easily
- Consider page weight especially if you have a lot of images. Even more so if you need to serve high-res images for retina screens
Let’s keep pushing the web forward, but also let’s not forget the fundamentals.
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