A new, light­weight datepick­er wid­get, Pickadate.js, was released recent­ly, and caused a few peo­ple to con­tact its cre­ator, @Amsul, regard­ing a lack of acces­si­bil­i­ty fea­tures in the code. His reply was quite depressing:

Our tar­get mar­ket does­n’t need it [acces­si­bil­i­ty], so its safe for us to use. 

Most of us, I’m sure, would admit that we could do a bet­ter job of mak­ing our web­sites acces­si­ble, but to active­ly state that a11y isn’t required seems wil­ful­ly stu­pid. I don’t know how you get to serve pages only to your tar­get mar­ket. I mean, this is the web; it’s pub­lic; stuff gets everywhere.

Through sheer serendip­i­ty I read an arti­cle by Karl Groves about an hour lat­er, which states clear­ly why a11y should be some­thing you con­cern your­self with: Yes, actu­al­ly, it may be you one day. He sums it up perfectly:

If you mar­ket or devel­op ICT prod­ucts and ser­vices and you’re still ignor­ing acces­si­bil­i­ty, you’re ignor­ing the com­ing real­i­ty. One day it will be you, or some­one you know and love. 

I’m very proud to have been asked to present at the first Future of Web Design in Prague, Czech Repub­lic, lat­er this month. I’ll be giv­ing a one-day work­shop, called CSS3 Mas­ter Class, then pre­sent­ing a talk with the title CSS3 Lay­outs for the Mul­ti-screen World in the Design track the fol­low­ing day.

If you fan­cy see­ing a great line-up of local and inter­na­tion­al speak­ers in the beau­ti­ful city of Prague you can get a 10% dis­count by using the code SPEAKER10 when you reg­is­ter; that’s almost €50 off a one-day tick­et, €90 off a two-day tick­et, and over €100 off the full work­shop and con­fer­ence tick­et. That should help con­vince your boss to pay for it. Hope to see some of you there.