Accessibility for free

In the previous chapter, we mentioned that HTML and CSS was largely responsive by design. It actually takes some work to prevent HTML from being responsive.

The same is somewhat true for accessibility. This isn't because HTML was really originally built with accessibility in mind (it wasn't), but because many of the assistive technologies that have been developed had to cope with the web content that wasn't accessible. In these cases, the assistive technology had to glean as much information as possible from the markup. Some HTML elements, such as a, input, select, option, and so on, provide a lot of useful information. Screen readers have developed an understanding of how these are often used and how to interact with them over the years.

HTML 2.0 brought about the famous alt attribute. Here were the first glimmerings of accessibility on the web, but it wasn't added solely for accessibility. The alt attribute is meant to render when the original content can't be rendered...