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

Overview of accessibility testing using DevTools (Microsoft)

• A guide by the Microsoft Edge DevTools team, though almost all of it applies to any modern browser.
• This mammoth article is a 23 minute read, and covers how to use DevTools for automated accessibility testing, by working through the accessibility ‘warnings’ in the console. It then describes how you should manually test your page by:
  • Resizing the viewport to simulate a zoomed in or mobile device.
  • Attempt to interact with the page with a keyboard, and keep an eye out for focus styles.
  • Inspecting the Accessibility Tree to check for elements with a “generic” role (usually attributed to being encoded as a div or span rather than a button), which won’t be available to users of assistive technology.
  • Simulating hover/focus states on interactable elements and checking their contrast.
  • Testing with dark and light themes.
  • Emulating vision deficiencies with things like blur filters.
  • Verifying that the page respects the prefers-reduced-motion media query.
• It’s worth at least a skim through – chances are you’ll learn something!

fingerspelling.xyz

• This is a website that gamifies teaching you sign language. It uses your webcam to recognise sign language hand gestures, and works extremely well! You gradually progress through different levels of difficulty, eventually covering the entire alphabet.
• The game is an initiative by digital creative studio Hello Monday and the American Society for Deaf Children.

Why your brain loves closed captioning

• 18% of the UK population regularly uses closed captioning, of which only 1 in 5 actually have hearing difficulties. Why?
• The article cites lots of reasons, such as helping with learning a new language. It can also be useful for people with autism and ADHD by providing “deeper context clues”. It also covers situational impairments, such as when sirens or other noises from outside drown out the sound of the movie. And of course, captions allow you to catch up on content on your phone, without disturbing the person next to you.
• “We can read faster than we can speak,” says Dr. Stephen Christman, a cognitive psychologist and professor of psychology at The University of Toledo. “With closed captioning on, the viewer can quickly read the current dialogue and then turn their attention back to the visual action and use their knowledge of what is being said — and what is about to be said — to enhance their appreciation of the nonverbal/visual aspects of what is happening on the screen.”
• The article cites some downsides, however: “It can really wreck a great punchline or suspenseful twist, making it ill-suited to anything that relies on surprise. It can be irritating when it’s poorly executed and riddled with errors.”

Accessibility Advocates Sign Open Letter Urging People Not To Use AccesiBe and Other Overlay Products

• Over 400 accessibility advocates and developers have signed an open letter calling on the industry to avoid using controversial “accessibility overlay products”, the most famous of which is accessiBe. These ‘widgets’ you can install on your website often claim to make your site WCAG compliant, by pulling in third party scripts to ‘fix’ problems such as missing alt text.
• The document lists first-hand accounts from people with disabilities struggling to use websites that have implemented overlays.
• It also describes the privacy issues of such overlays, which detect when assistive technology is running on the device, exposing the fact that the end user has a disability, with no option for them to choose whether or not to disclose it themselves.
• The document recommends that people fix the underlying accessibility issues at source, and abandon use of quick fixes such as these, as they are not effective.

Blind Accessibility Tips

• blindaccessibilitytips.com is a resource for visually-impaired people to learn how to use assistive technology. It covers tasks like navigating the web, editing content in Microsoft Word, and using Windows File Explorer. The site is focused on Windows users using JAWS or NVDA. Though still clearly in early development, it’s a nice attempt to consolidate tutorials in one place.

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