Last week I got to chat with Evolving Web’s UI engineer, Firat Ikiler. Firat has extensive experience in web design and frontend development, and he’s now one of our foremost experts on accessible design. We talked about how he acquired his accessibility skills, how accessibility plays into his day-to-day work, and some of the critical concepts (and common misconceptions) involved in accessible digital design.
“I learned about accessibility when I started with Evolving Web,” Firat told me. It wasn’t at all something that was on his radar only a few years ago, but now it’s in the mainstream.
According to him, training, whether self-guided or via a structured program, is the best way to learn about accessibility. It isn’t something you’re likely to have learned much about in school, so you’ll need to seek out the right resources to get a good understanding of the fundamentals.
📰 Read next: How we plan a UX workshop, with UX lead Annika Oeser
This is essential, he says, because whenever accessibility is part of a project, “it’s impossible to fix everything all at once”. Any tool you use for auditing will undoubtedly uncover a host of issues—sometimes hundreds, even thousands—which can easily overwhelm someone who doesn’t have a firm enough grasp on accessibility fundamentals.
“When I use a tool such as SiteImprove, I often find myself looking up the different issues that are flagged in order to make sure that they’re relevant and actually need fixing.” You learn a lot as you go along, researching things as they arise, according to Firat; especially since best practices tend to be in constant evolution.
All in all, while formal accessibility training will definitely give you a solid head start, there’s no better learning experience than “experiencing an issue and solving it yourself.” “This is a huge part of the learning process for accessibility, in my opinion,” Firat says.
When I asked him if accessibility was something we needed to tell clients about or rather something they’d request, he told me that in the past two or three years it’s become a requirement in almost every request for proposal we’ve answered. This is likely due to a number of factors, such as the growing body of accessibility legislation and standards and a general increase in awareness towards the importance of digital accessibility.
“One or two years ago it wasn’t really an obligatory thing, but now companies are required by law to comply with accessibility requirements, so they’re definitely aware and asking for it.”
I asked Firat how accessibility played into his day-to-day work as a front-end developer and UI engineer. “I try to apply accessibility rules while the project is in an ongoing state,” he told me. “Trying to fix all accessibility issues at the end of a project would be too much work”
“Every day I’m checking all of the components I develop, making sure they follow accessibility best practices,” he continued. “I try to correct issues as they arise”.
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