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

The Click-Away Pound Survey 2019

• This 32 page report (ironically only available as Word/PDF documents) of last year’s survey has some highlights. There are 7.15 million internet users in the UK that have access needs (an increase of 1 million since 2016), with a spending power of £24.8 billion. Around 70% will click away from an inaccessible site, meaning businesses are losing out on £17.1 billion per year. The survey was last run in 2016 and things haven’t improved measurably since then. I’ve attached a graphic from the report that helps show the scale of the problem.

Disproportionate Burden Thoughts

• A blog post by accessibility consultant George Rhodes, with their views on public organisations’ use of “disproportionate burden” as an excuse to (temporarily) avoid full compliance with the regulations. 60 public sector bodies have claimed disproportionate burden and been asked to provide evidence via Freedom of Information requests. Many of their responses were unsatisfactory.
• Background: UK public bodies have until September 2020 to ensure compliance with the Public Sector Bodies (Websites and Mobile Applications) (No. 2) Accessibility Regulations 2018. Exemptions will be made for those for whom it would be a ‘disproportionate burden’ on the grounds of organisation size, and cost of fixing vs benefit to users.

An Accessible Digital BBC – 2019 in review

• Blog post by Emma Pratt Richens, exploring the top BBC accessibility improvements of 2019. iPlayer introduced subtitle size controls, and attempts to deliver fewer animations where people have asked for “reduced motion”. Bitesize Primary improved keyboard a11y across its games. News introduced the BBC Reith font, designed to be easy to read on small screens. A developer built taba11y Chrome plugin in their spare time. Several teams built accessibility more prominently into their workflow.

Bonjour! ¡Bienvenidos! Seeing AI expands to 5 new languages

• If you’ve not heard of the “Seeing AI” app from Microsoft, it’s an all-encompassing app that uses your phone’s camera for many things, including reading text, scanning product barcodes for info, recognising faces, and describing the scene in front of you. I hadn’t heard of it prior to this article, which describes its expansion to 5 different languages, and describes the ways real people use it, sometimes in unexpected ways. Download it from the app store and give it a try today!

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