Harris is a web developer with a strong passion for digital equality. He works at Deque Systems as the Principal UI Engineer building awesome web applications. He wrote Cauldron (Deque’s pattern library), Dragon Drop, and is the lead developer on axe Pro. When he is not at work, he still finds time to contribute to numerous open source projects.
The most efficient way to build accessible websites and apps is to “shift left” by incorporating accessibility testing into the earliest stages of your development and design process. In this article, Harris Schneiderman will walk you through the process of analyzing a wireframe from an accessibility perspective and making coding decisions to optimize for accessibility in both design and development phases.
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One of the toughest challenges Harris Schneiderman came across is the reorderable drag-and-drop list. While a reorderable list is a somewhat commonly used widget with intuitive conventions for mouse users, it’s not clear how keyboard-only assistive technology users can perform this simple task. Dragon Drop seeks to fill this gap by providing means for all users to perform this somewhat common task. Due to the absence of supported ARIA attributes, Dragon Drop utilizes live regions to convey the information needed for all users to reorder a list.
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