Online retail giant Zappos is now selling single shoes to help those with disabilities American shoes and accessories seller Zappos have started allowing customers to purchase single shoes, or shoes in different sizes. The pilot program, which claims to be the first of its kind, allows amputees and people with physical disabilities to purchase exactly… [Read More]

Building the Woke Web: Web Accessibility, Inclusion & Social Justice A List Apart article by Olu Niyiawosusi, drawing attention to the 40% of the world’s population that still does not have access to the internet. More locally, only 37% of people living in social housing in the UK are online. This further divides the world,… [Read More]

Planning, creating and publishing accessible social media campaigns This guide from the Government Communication Service has great tips, such as testing the readability of your content (aiming for a 9-year old’s reading age), avoiding use of bit.ly links, avoiding baking in text overlays into your video and ensuring voiceovers are at least 20db louder than… [Read More]

Missouri woman sews accessible masks with vinyl mouth ‘window’ An article from May, but on a subject that still dominates. The introduction of mask wearing to reduce coronavirus spread has had a disproportionate impact on the deaf and hard of hearing community, and many of us rely on lip reading more than we know. Demand… [Read More]

Disney+ Honored by the American Council of the Blind for Their Audio Description Tracks Audio descriptions are added to films in order to recreate the visual experiences happening onscreen. Disney+ has received an Achievement Award in Audio Description from the American Council of the Blind (ACB) for their commitment to adding audio description tracks to… [Read More]

Piccadilly Lights turned upside down to raise awareness of challenges faced by blind people For the week of the 6th July, London’s infamous advertising billboard at Piccadilly Circus was turned upside down to raise awareness of the challenges raised by social distancing for the blind and partially sighted. RNIB said “the usual methods of navigating… [Read More]

Killer Instinct: How To: Play The Game Blindfolded (video, or article if you’d prefer) An interesting video by SightlessKombat, a blind gamer describing how they rose to the top tier of players by relying on their hearing. By turning up the volume of the ‘heads up display’, they could listen carefully to the pitch changing… [Read More]

Accessibility Dont’s, Learn From Basic Mistakes in Web Design Adam Laki shares five common a11y fails to avoid. 1: don’t remove underlines on links. 2: don’t remove outlines on focusable elements. 3: don’t remove textarea resize functionality. 4: don’t open links in new browser windows. 5: don’t use fixed font-size. There are caveats to each… [Read More]

Amazing haptic speaker lets visually impaired people read braille in midair Researchers at Bayreuth University, Germany, are working on a speaker system that uses acoustic force and ultrasound to recreate traditional braille writing in midair. The system known as HaptiRead comes at a very poignant time as people are worried about touching surfaces during this… [Read More]

We need more inclusive web performance metrics Scott Jehl writes about how popular user metrics such as Largest Contentful Paint are not necessarily useful to everyone. Users relying on screen readers may not be able to read the page until it becomes fully interactive, sometimes long after the DOM is complete. Scott has raised an… [Read More]