Member-only story
React And Its Ilk Are NOT “Accessible”
I am oft disturbed at how people can claim to know accessibility, and then claim that somehow, magically, these systems of client-side scripting based rendering meets accessibility minimums.
I’ve been programming for four decades, and working as an accessibility and efficiency consultant for ten years, and let me tell you something. If your page does not have scripting off graceful degradation — a big fancy way of saying “if JavaScript is blocked/unavailable your page still works” — then it does NOT meet accessibility minimums. It is a failure under the “perceivable” part of the WCAG since users in that circumstance get no content!
I’m not saying that client side scripting in and of itself is wrong, or bad. As I previously wrote, quality JavaScript should enhance an already working page. And that is precisely where React, Vue, etc all piss on accessibility from orbit as they do not function in that manner.
That’s fine and dandy if you’re making full stack applications using something like Electron or nw.js as you have full control over what UA is in use; much less that JavaScript has to be present for such tech to even work. Nonetheless it is a giant middle finger to users of normal websites in normal browsers.
As a dearly departed friend of mine once said:
The only thing we can know for certain about who will visit your website, is that we have absolutely no clue about who will visit your website.
You don’t know what UA they’re using, what they’re going to have enabled/disabled, what they can and cannot turn off because of work, or if things like JavaScript are even relevant to the media target.
That so many developers are dismissive of graceful degradation — for JavaScript; for CSS; for images; even for HTML itself — is a major contributor to why so many companies are now getting dragged through the legal system.
There’s more to building websites than worrying about perfectly sighted users on graphical displays with all the bells and whistles.
