Accessibility is not all about making things accessible to the blind. It's more than that. To name a few: Making articles easy to read or to use your website via keyboard without mouse interaction. But also providing captions for the hearing impaired in videos or below audio files.
By turning off CSS you forget that blind people are different. Some can distinct between light or dark, others can see structures and the other group of blinds can see a few metres. The structure seeing blinds may use the structure of a page to navigate even more fast. And imaging you turn off CSS for all these different blind people? The result: The structure seeing blinds may get stuck with this new situation.
There are more disabilities like cognitive disease, motor- or hearing impairment. By turning off CSS you don't make your website accessible to these kind of people. For example: The users with cognitive disease need an easy to use website and easy to read text. Hemingwayapp helps you to write an easy to read text for your website.
You may also provide captions in videos or below audios for hearing impaired users.
It would be nice to make website controls like Buttons etc. reachable via keyboard. There are several ways to do this e.g. with javascript, with the HTML accesskey- or the tabindex attribute.
You see, turning off CSS don't solve much of the problems users with disabilities face. And users, who don't need CSS, can turn it off in browser settings. You don't have to create a website without CSS. The ToDo list below may be helpful for creating accessible websites:
- Accessibility via keyboard
- Easy to use interface
- Easy to read content
- Captions in videos
- Providing the corresponding text to an audio
- Using
altattribute onimgtags
And be sure in future we get to know more things to take care of in everyday website creation.
The webapp Hemingwayapp helped me to write this article. Thanks to GitHub User svinkle for guiding me to Hemingway.