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Accessibility and 508 compliance

Public websites that are backed by government institutions must comply to certain accessibility standards for people with disabilities. US federal agencies are required to comply with section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act, the EU is on the process of making accessibility a legal requirement, and many other governments have already chosen to do so (like Spain since December 2005).

Accessibility requirements in its current form obligates your website to be usable without requiring the user to have javascript enabled. This may change in the future, as an increasing number of javascript frameworks incorporate ARIA roles to their generated HTML code.

Even if your case is not required by law to be accessible, you may want to support the following use cases:

Some system administrators disable or filter javascript contents on their networks, mostly because of XSS issues
It helps search engines to understand your website layout.
Javascript event handlers will not get triggered when opening links in new windows or tabs, when using bookmarks or e-mail links.

Loom helps under the hoods with some concrete cases:

Javascript user input validation will be repeated again at the server. This extra security guarantees that user input will become validated with browsers that do not have javascript enabled.
Javascript menus will be rendered as HTML lists if javascript is turned off.
Tabs will be displayed all at once if javascript is disabled.

Further discussion on this topic can be checked out here.

Loom is a member of the European Accessibility Portal.