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

Sa11y – accessibility quality assurance assistant

• An accessibility quality assurance tool geared towards content authors: Sa11y visually highlights common errors, with contextual information. Try out the demo.

Text link Accessibilty: aria-label and title

• Deque article testing <a> links with various combinations of title and aria-label. The conclusion is that aria-label is the best supported attribute, and links to the ARIA8 WCAG technique which sites good use cases such as: <a aria-label="Read more about Seminole tax hike">Read more...</a>.

Twitter announces change to default alt text setting

• Via TwitterA11y: starting May 27th, you no longer need a setting to add alt text to your images on Twitter. Prior to this, it was an exclusively opt-in feature.

Could coronavirus kickstart more accessible tech?

• In this BBC video, we discover how live captioning enables deaf colleagues to participate in remote meetings in this era of coronavirus. It references an article on bighack.org comparing the best video conferencing software for accessibility, which found that some popular platforms such as Zoom do not provide live captioning.

HTMHell special: close buttons

• Article by HTMHell picking apart the real-world implementations of the ‘close’ button. Some sites use images or SVGs with no alt text, some use ‘X’ to represent ‘close’ (which is lost on screen readers), some use <div> or <a> elements where a <button> is required. There are a few recommended solutions depending on the visual style you’re going for.

Is it ok to ‘grey out’ disabled buttons?

• UX Collective article that makes some interesting points: WCAG 2.1 success criterion 1.4.3 (“Contrast”) does not apply to text that is “part of an inactive user interface component”. However, if providing low-contrast styles for disabled buttons, the author encourages measures such as ensuring colour is not the only affordance, reducing opacity of the primary button colour when disabled rather than opting for grey, adding supporting text, and applying aria-disabled="true" to disabled buttons to support all screen readers.

I Don’t Care What Google or Apple or Whoever Did

• Adrian Roselli complains that when he raises accessibility/usability issues with clients, their response is “but Google does this”. He then lists several poor UI changes the big companies have made and subsequently U-turned on, such as Google’s form fields without boxes, or Apple’s super thin typefaces in iOS. Heydon Pickering wrote a similar article in January. Both alluded to the fact that you wouldn’t want to replicate these companies’ designs anyway: why make your product look and feel like Google’s?

The Last of Us Part II: Accessibility features detailed

• A comprehensive article on the PlayStation blog, detailing how The Last of Us Part II comes with three presets for different kinds of disabilities, but every setting can be individually overwritten. Gameplay alterations such as ‘invisible while prone’ allow gamers to enjoy stealth mode they might otherwise not be able to. Directional arrows accompanying subtitles show deaf gamers where the speech is coming from. Every command, including touchpad swipes and controller shake, can be remapped to different controller inputs.

Deaf fitness instructor calls for more accessibility in workout classes

• India Morse (@youleanmeup) is a fitness instructor on Instagram. She was born deaf, and found that workout classes aren’t visual enough for the deaf community, and Instagram as a platform is lacking live-captions. So she launched Coaching by India; an online coaching app with captions and an interpreter voicing India’s signs, so that is accessible to everyone.

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