More bad tech writing
A ZDNET blogger wrote a post today talking about the Target Accessibility lawsuit. I thought that this would be a nice time to bring up the lawsuit again and maybe get some new information about the case.
But then I started reading it.
Ugh.
It’s bad enough that our elected officials have very little technical knowledge and pass legislation that is completely counter intuitive, but at times I can’t blame them, as the state of tech reporting is even worse.
Take this one sentence:
“At a bare minimum, to make basic HTML-driven sites more accessible to PWDs, authors of Web content need to program an alternative text tag into their hyperlinks.”
Let me correct some of that:
- You don’t have to program alt text. It’s just markup. HTML. No programming needed.
- You don’t create an alternative text tag. You create an alt attribute.
- Text hyperlinks, if well written, can be perfectly accessible without needing an alt attribute. It’s images (and specifically what the Target case is about) that need the proper alt attributes.
Am I being pedantic? Yes. But aren’t reporters SUPPOSED to be pedantic? I expect a tech writer talking about web production best practices to…uh…actually know what they are writing.
Why is this a bad thing? Well, the article continues on to finally make the point that while accessibility is important, it’s a lot of work and if the company doesn’t want to, who are we to say they should?
In the end, the article is yet another example of people simply not getting the basic concept of what accessible design is: It is simply BETTER design. And we really shouldn’t have articles being written that promote sloppier design, should we?
