Ease of webpage creation and accessibility

I feel like rambling right now. I’m just a webdev student in this big wide world, with some opinions on stuff, so this isn’t an appeal to authority kind of thing. Maybe it won’t make much sense, who knows 

One thing that interests me a lot in the realm of web development is accessibility. How can we make this web page easy to navigate, and accessible for those who are disabled, or who are not as used to using web platforms, such as the elderly? I’ve been thinking about it a lot especially lately due to a client project I’m working on, which has ease of navigation and accessibility at its prime.

And I’ve been thinking about how easy it has been in the past few years, to create entire pages and sites with tools like Carrd or Wix. Anyone can make a website. Anyone, even those with little to no web creation skills. Its a good thing in some aspect, it may give some the desire to go and learn how to make one entirely on their own. The ease of online learning tools also allows for easy and quick web page creation without many skills, which is great.

But, from an accessibility standpoint, I feel like having anyone be able to create a page or a site also makes a lot of webpages totally inaccessible. Small thing like alternative text is overlooked (its a trap I fall in when using social medias, i forget to alt text my images), navigation is complicated, fonts that are hard to read, and sometimes (more often in personal pages like those made on carrd), strobing colors effect that can lead to headaches, sensory overload or seizures present on webpages.

The latter had me thinking. I’m very close to the scenecore community and have been for a good amount of years on Tumblr, and I understand the aesthetics of it and other somewhat related aesthetics. But a lot of online spaces are inherently inaccessible to disabled people, and its a bit saddening. A lot of those who do these mistakes are young, so there’s no hard feelings. I definetively think that information should be circulated a lot more, in an informative manner.

Continuing on, I feel like even before, web accessibility wasn’t a really considered issue, information didn’t circulate as easily as it did today. And I still think that it isn’t brought up a lot, especially considering personal web pages and accessibility. Its definetively an issue that needs to be talked about.

Its exciting to be gain back control on how we present our social media pages on a highly corporate and sanitized internet. But I think we should also keep in mind that some aspects of our pages can be inaccessible, be it the color schemes, the animation on them, the fonts we use, if our images contain alt text… To the best of our ability, and own knowledge on the subject!

I’ve done similar mistakes of making my webpages over the top in an attempt to reconnect back to these more innocent online time. But reading more abt accessibility helped me understand that, I should tone it down, and maybe find creative ways to express myself while allowing my webpages to be viewable by as many ppl as possible!

And I’m still not perfect. I still forget to add alt text to my images. Its a long process.

That was my ramble! I’m open to discussions in the comments (please stay respectful), and other perspectives. I’m just doing a lot of thinking, as always lol

Have a good night!