Accessibility for Peers

As a coder, you may be thinking about accessibility for end users. Are you thinking about your peers as well?

You may or may not be able to influence the accessibility of the operating system or coding tools. But, there are things every coder can. E.g., documentation and source control repositories

Is your technical documentation clear and accessible by an expansive audience? Or is it laden with tricky language, local slang, and colloquialisms that cause barriers for others’ comprehension?

What about the architectural diagrams used to convey concepts within documentation? Are you accounting for Color blindness and vestibular conditions when producing diagrams. Is information conveyed clearly without having to rely on only color to communicate an idea? Are there text descriptions?

Do videos in the documentation contain closed captions?

Would you consider distributing your documentation in a way that’s accessible to screen readers and assistive devices?

Not all your peers may have the best internet connection or access to the latest, fastest computer equipment. Excessive code bloat can also slow developers down significantly. Slower machines will have trouble crunching repetitive development builds.

For team productivity, ship only the absolutely necessary code and assets. Motivation for Git ‘ignore’? Smaller code footprint is not just for cleaner but more accessible repos.

What else would you add?