Writing assessible software

[andrewphilipsmith]

Summary

A minimal set of information that "every programmer" should know about ensuring that they are writing software which is accessible.

Impact

Alternatives

There are many detailed guides about accessible published by some of the big tech companies and others.

Many of these are massive and realistically won't be read by everyone.

Many focus on features of web apps or large GUI, which are much larger than REG projects, or assume much larger developer teams than REG projects.

Many software projects in REG result in CLI tools. These still have accessibility needs that should be considered. I'm thinking of a page along the lines of; "The absolute minimum every software development absolutely positively must know about accessibility (no excuses)" (with apologies to
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2003/10/08/the-absolute-minimum-every-software-developer-absolutely-positively-must-know-about-unicode-and-character-sets-no-excuses)

There is a separate and extremely important topic of running a research and software project in a way that is inclusive and accessible. This is out of scope for this page/chapter.

Sections

Suggested:

Basic knowledge of accessibility features of key operating systems (so that you can work in sync with these, rather than work against them).
text-to-speech
speech-to-text
colour-blindness
non-standard pointing devices

(to update as part of the process of writing it)

Updates