Making Our Patterns More Accessible
Published on for Cloud Four
Cloud Four’s accessibility best practices have changed a lot in the last five years. Back then, we focused on crafting semantic markup, writing fallbacks for images and iconography, keeping focus outlines intact, avoiding icon fonts, and using progressive enhancement wherever we could.
In our defense, that’s still a pretty good baseline! But the work of folks like Marcy Sutton, Heydon Pickering and Léonie Watson opened our eyes to how much more we could do.
Today, I’m proud to say we treat accessibility as more than a technical requirement: It’s a consistent acknowledgement of our audience’s diversity that starts with discovery and persists through delivery. It’s become a natural extension of what we believe and the principles that inspired our open device lab.
In honor of Global Accessibility Awareness Day, I thought it might be fun to quantify our evolution by previewing the accessibility improvements we’re in the process of making today to the Cloud Four patterns we debuted four years ago. (These changes haven’t made it to our live site yet, but we’re fans of sharing our works in progress.)