Accessible Fonts: Please, STOP Using PX For Screen! A very ranty article that nevertheless explains quite well the reasons for using em (rather than px) for your font sizes, media queries, margins and padding. It dispels the myth that the ‘default’ font size is always 16px (the author’s default is 20px). rem is argued against… [Read More]

What is ARIA even for? (video, ~8 mins) A quirky, almost NSFW video by Heydon Pickering, explaining when and why to add ARIA roles and attributes to your HTML. It is best used when there is no good native HTML solution to your problem. For example, a ‘toggle button’ could be achieved with checkboxes, but… [Read More]

6 Ways Travel Has Become More Accessible During the Pandemic Flexible booking & cancellation policies (to encourage people to book flights etc; those who have bouts of debilitating medical symptoms have long requested more flexibility). More accessibility fixes on websites (due to suffering businesses trying to market to more customers). A move toward contact-free (e.g…. [Read More]

Accessible Routing in JavaScript Frameworks A Deque article by Mark Steadman, describing how to handle transitions between page loads in Single Page Applications. Ideally the focus would go to a <h1>, or failing that, it should go to the body of the page. In either case, the focussed element needs a tabindex=”-1″ so that JavaScript… [Read More]

Sony Outlines PS5 And DualSense Accessibility Features Sony has released a blog post describes the PS5’s new accessibility features, such as built-in screen reader, and voice dictation software. Gamers will be able to adjust colour contrast on subtitles/closed captions, and reduce or disable haptic feedback in the DualSense controllers. Well done to the lucky few… [Read More]

Use feature flags to make your website more accessible Interesting idea from Heidi Waterhouse: allow users of your app to set their preferences for things like font size, contrast, and font family, and persist these preferences in a database [or cookie]. Then, when rendering the page for the returning user, retrieve their preferences and give… [Read More]

The Robot That Gives Humans a Job (video, 3 minutes) At the “Avatar Robot Cafe” in Tokyo, all of the servers are robots – but this isn’t the typical story of automation taking peoples’ jobs. These robots are controlled by people outside of the cafe who would never be able to physically do the job… [Read More]

That Time I Tried Browsing the Web Without CSS Jon Kantner describes his experience with some popular sites after turning off CSS. 12.5% of users with low vision (who use assistive technology) browse the web with custom stylesheets, so sites need to have good structural markup to build upon. The most common issues Jon encountered… [Read More]

Developing Real-Time, Automatic Sign Language Detection for Video Conferencing Google intern Amit Moryossef writes about a research paper on real-time sign language detection using human pose estimation. The model, called PoseNet, reduces input from a HD image to a small set of landmarks on the user’s body, which can be analysed frame-to-frame to predict whether… [Read More]

Math, schizophrenia and the story of a life saved by the Internet A US podcast sent in by frequent11y subscriber Nick. It’s an anonymous interview with someone who has schizophrenia. Whilst studying to become a mathematician, they were faced with severe anxiety attending the face-to-face lectures, so asked if they could just do the assignments… [Read More]