I don't agree that accessibility is a training issue and I certainly don't agree that it would take a month to become familiar with accessibility guidelines.
Rather, download a screen reader (for Windows I like Windows Eyes), learn to use it, shut off your monitor and spend one hour trying to use the web. That will give you all the context that you need. Once you're armed with this experience, make navigating through your site with your screen reader part of your regular QA process.
If you follow these steps you will:
- craft sites that are significantly easier for people with visual impairments to use.
- build sites that are easier for search engines to crawl.
- gain an understanding of WCAG that you can apply to everything you develop.
This method will not prevent usability nightmares like horrible font/icons, but it will get you most of the way to WCAG.
Or, you could start with the 4 principles of Accessibility (Perceivability, Operability, Usability, Robustness) and build a working knowledge set on that.
Screenreaders are complicated pieces of software, just an hour a day is not enough, you do need to fully immerse yourself as a blind person. Do your day job for a month using a screenreader and no monitor (from turning on the computer all the way to turning it off) - that will give you adequate platform in which to appreciate the blind people you want to serve.
But that's just one disability (though a large chunk). Visual impairments isn't just blind people. It's partially sighted, low vision, photosensitivity, tunnel vision, colour blindness - each have their own accessibility characteristics. And that's just sight-related accessibility issues... I haven't even started talking about motor-related disabilities, cognition related impairments.
Seriously, WCAG took absolutely ages to write, but it will give you a better perspective of a wider range of accessibility issues than using a screenreader for an hour a day.
So instead of having any sort of standards and accessibility best practices taught and adopted industry-wide, that take into account a much larger spectrum of disabilities, the programmers reading this should just go and spend an unspecified amount of time using a screen reader from now on?
Definitely not, but as the OP wrote, you don't start at the HTML5 spec if you want to learn to make web pages. Learning to use a screen reader and actually testing sites with it is not only a very important skill to have, but it will give developers more insight and perspective into accessibility. Standards can fill in the gaps, but I believe you still need a 'wow' moment when you feel completely lost on a website.
Rather, download a screen reader (for Windows I like Windows Eyes), learn to use it, shut off your monitor and spend one hour trying to use the web. That will give you all the context that you need. Once you're armed with this experience, make navigating through your site with your screen reader part of your regular QA process.
If you follow these steps you will:
- craft sites that are significantly easier for people with visual impairments to use.
- build sites that are easier for search engines to crawl.
- gain an understanding of WCAG that you can apply to everything you develop.
This method will not prevent usability nightmares like horrible font/icons, but it will get you most of the way to WCAG.