Your weekly frequent11y newsletter, brought to you by @ChrisBAshton:

Playing with state

• Article by Sarah Higley, exploring how best to denote the state of a Play/Pause video button for screen reader users. Most ‘toggle buttons’ for a binary state should have an aria-pressed attribute with value “on” or “off”; screen readers communicate this ‘state change’ more quickly than a change in property (such as aria-label). Sarah argues that the play/pause button, however, is the exception to the rule and should only change the aria-label (from “Play” to “Pause”), as changes in state don’t make sense in this context (“play button off”). Most importantly, avoid changing both or you’ll confuse your users (“play button, on” vs “pause button, off”).

When Things Go Wrong for Blind Users on Facebook, They Go Really Wrong

• An article highlighting the regularity of bugs and missing features encountered by screen reader users on the Facebook apps and site, with a strong message that there is an under-investment in accessibility development on Facebook and Instagram. A feature for adding colourful backgrounds to posts meant all posts were read out as “Awesome Text Status” for a week. Facebook’s attempt at automating alt text has met a muted response; “image may contain child” doesn’t allow screen reader users to participate. There are options to provide alt text on uploaded images, and forms for flagging accessibility issues, but both are criticised as being too hard to find. Some users have created Facebook groups to share images of text they want transcribing by sighted volunteers. There’s something to be said about the ‘move fast and break things’ ethos and what that means for disabled users.

If it has audio, now it can have captions

• Google have created functionality for the Pixel 4 phone, which they’ve dubbed Live Caption. Like the auto caption feature on YouTube videos, this overlays text on your phone screen – when enabled – showing Google’s interpretation of the audio. The text overlay can be moved independently as demonstrated in this gif, and the captioning works independently of the audio source, so you can watch any video or audio in your browser or apps and be able to get captions. It works entirely locally, so doesn’t use any cell data and stays private on your phone. Google are hoping to roll this out to other Android manufacturers “in the coming year”.

Creating Online Environments That Work Well For Older Users

• An opinion piece by Barry Rueger, who for context is “well past sixty”. He makes several suggestions that are widely recognised as universally good practices, such as improving website load speed and ensuring good grammar and spelling. Others are more subjective: that older people prefer text and ignore videos in search results, or that they hold onto old, slow machines for longer. Barry makes the case for black text on white backgrounds; a controversial subject as several user groups find this harder to read (there are some comments below the article to that effect). Finally, an interesting point about the success of Amazon being down to its website’s consistency; “we know the site, and we know that we can do our shopping quickly and painlessly”. He suggests resisting the urge to reinvent your website unnecessarily.

Accessibility drives aesthetics

• A recent article by UX designer, Alex Chen. It debunks the myth that accessible designs have to be ugly designs, giving real-world examples of websites (GOV.UK gets a mention here) and products (RX protein bar packaging) that are both accessible and aesthetically pleasing. That aside, Alex asserts that the two are not of equal importance; an interface change may not look quite as visually pleasing to one person, but another person is now able to use it. Some people concentrate their efforts on the ‘normal’ use case, neglecting designing the ‘edge cases’ for disabled people, but that is an ableist practice; “edge cases [should] refer to scenarios, not humans”. There’s a final point about disabilities disproportionately affecting people of a certain race or class, and that we have an opportunity to start to level the playing field for all.

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