Posted June 16, 2025 by Nolan Lawson in accessibility, Web. Tagged: accessibility. 2 Comments
All web developers know, at some level, that accessibility is important. But when push comes to shove, it can be hard to prioritize it above a bazillion other concerns when you’re trying to center a
A lot of accessibility advocates lead with the moral argument: for example, that disabled people should have just as much access to the internet as any other person, and that it’s a blight on our whole industry that we continually fail to make it happen.
I personally find these arguments persuasive. But experience has also taught me that “eat your vegetables” is one of the least effective arguments in the world. Scolding people might get them to agree with you in public, or even in principle, but it’s unlikely to change their behavior once no one’s watching.
So in this post, I would like to list some of my personal, completely selfish reasons for building accessible UIs. No finger-wagging here: just good old hardheaded self-interest!
Debuggability
When I’m trying to debug a web app, it’s hard to orient myself in the DevTools if the entire UI is “div soup”:
This is actually a table, but you wouldn’t know it from looking at the HTML:
If I’m trying to debug this in the DevTools, I’m completely lost. Where are the rows? Where are the columns?
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