How to consider the ethical implications of code as a web developer
As developers, we are building websites that are used all over the world. Users are becoming more cautious about how their data is being used. Because of the complexity of web applications, it’s hard to know the consequences in advance. If you look around the vast majority of developers never took an ethics course at school or work. For this reason, ethical thinking is crucial in the education of developers. This kind of thinking is not only made up of abstract principles but it’s derived from professional life and circumstances. It is our responsibility to think carefully about our decisions because it can significantly impact our users.
The current state of ethics in web development
Ethics should be a core component of development in general, and it can be approached from two different directions. First, it can describe the activity of developers making practical choices that affect others in significant ways. Secondly, you can use it to make up guidelines, principles, or ethical imperatives that are perceived as extremely morally necessary.
The focus of web development is primarily on the technical adequacy of the products developed. Billions of people depending on computers to effectively live their lives have led to the need for developers to give more attention to non-technical aspects of the field. Developers have to learn to think with normative concepts like moral responsibility and legal responsibility and rights. To make things easier to understand, humans make decisions about computers, and those decisions affect people’s lives. Human values are linked to technical decisions in this way. The activity of these ethics takes place when developers make decisions that affect other people.
Why developers are ethically obligated to users
Web development is a profession that, like all professions, receives public support and respect. To earn that respect, you have to think carefully about the non-technical aspects; why did you build the website, and how will it affect the end-users?
How developers can cause harm to others by not securing their websites
As web developers, we can play a critical and positive role in protecting our users from attacks on their privacy. Hackers attack web applications to steal sensitive online data, steal money and create chaos in society. Cybercrime can cause massive damage to customers. Therefore web developers have to secure their websites. Many people believe that they don’t need to worry about security issues because they are not the target, but it happens more often than we think. Data is a massive asset for hackers, and they are seeking out more than usernames, passwords, credit cards, and bank accounts. It’s crucial to protect the user data as a developer.
Accessibility
As developers, it is important to focus our personal development on learning how to develop accessible products. Most of the time we lack education on how disabilities prevent people from using our products. It requires a lot of work to make your products more accessible. By offering people better experiences, they are far more likely to become repeat visitors.
1. Use Alt-tags
Even if your webpage loads, there are many people who use voice readers. Often they cannot read the page or do not want to read it. For that reason, it is useful to use alt tags.
2. Use the ARIA tag
ARIA is a set of attributes you can add to HTML elements that define ways to make web content and applications more accessible to the visually impaired using assistive technologies. Often these accessibility issues are managed with native HTML. If this fails, ARIA is used to overcome these problems.
3. Keyboard navigation
Many users with motor disabilities rely on a keyboard. For example, people who have tremors that don’t allow fine muscle control. Some people can hardly use their hands or may use custom keyboards and other hardware that mimics the functionality of a keyboard. They use these keyboards to operate controls. Controls are any interactive components on the page, such as buttons, links, form input, videos, and other interactive content.
4. Use default HTML tags
Don’t mess with the standard HTML tags. For example, it is not a good practice to use anchors for buttons. You need to add an extra javascript event for these buttons to work the same way. It’s not a smart approach, because you can easily use a normal button. So use buttons for buttons, table, tbody, td and th for tables and h1, h2, and h3 tags for titles. By not implementing this properly, it will confuse screen readers because all screen readers follow a certain way to read the elements on a web page.
Location data
We often have to ask users for permission to use their location data. This can be problematic when identifiable data such as location is collected while using our apps. The user may not realize they are in a study or assume that the apps they are using wouldn’t collect this data.
But using location tracking is not supposed to be immoral. We often use this to provide people with the services they expect to have in place. It’s just very difficult to balance privacy and app functionality.
Conclusion 💭
As developers, we can apply ethics to our work by having an ethical mindset in developing our products. We need to think carefully about the impact of our code on our users and colleagues. And we need to learn more about development ethics if we want to take our work to the next level. Let’s improve the lives of others by acting in ways that carefully consider the consequences of our actions while we’re building awesome products!
