Inheritance Tax: The Real Cost of not Making Content Accessible Simon Mellins, Ebook Technology Coordinator at Penguin, writes a condensed version of a talk he gave at the London Book Fair, where he described the accessibility case for creating good tags, metadata and logically structuring e-books. Here, he concentrates more on the legacy it leaves;… [Read More]

How Eastenders’ Ben Mitchell is setting new standards for deaf representation Eastenders‘ Ben Mitchell character was deaf in one ear but has now lost hearing in his other after a dramatic boating accident, and has to learn how to adapt. Interesting stats: 12 million people in the UK are deaf or live with hearing loss…. [Read More]

How Web Accessibility Works Segun Ola gives a brief but useful overview of how browsers generate an Accessibility Object Model (AOM) in addition to the DOM/CSSOM, and how this AOM interfaces between the browser and the assistive technology used by the user. He distinguishes between native primitives (e.g. checkbox) and more complicated widgets (such as… [Read More]

The troubled state of screen readers in multilingual situations Xurxe Toivo García shares their findings when testing different screen reader / browser / OS combinations with a simple English web page featuring a <span> with a different lang to the main page. All were inconsistent and none worked perfectly. On VoiceOver for desktop, paragraph text… [Read More]

Volunteer scheme that tackles loneliness amongst young disabled people thrives online during pandemic The Sense Buddying scheme matches volunteers and young people with disabilities to spend time together to help combat loneliness, something experienced by 77% of this demographic. Prior to the pandemic, matches did activities in local communities in East London, but now video-chat… [Read More]

For Mothers Of Black Children With Disabilities, Living With Twice The Fear Kim Kaiser voices the fears she has for her black, autistic 14 year old son. “When an African American person is disabled and can’t process a police command, [the result could be fatal]”. She’s taught her son to to keep his hands out… [Read More]

My Accessibility-Tinged WWDC 2020 Wishlist The Apple Worldwide Developers Conference is running from June 22-26 this year. Steven Aquino shares his hopes for what Apple will showcase, including the ability to zoom in on emoji; brightness slider for the Apple Watch display; and a Magic Keyboard with Touch Bar.

Modesto Teen Who’s Legally Blind, Hearing Impaired Becomes Household Name In World Of Bowling Jacob Gaddam is a sixteen year old who bowls like a champion – despite being legally blind and hearing impaired. Watch the video on YouTube (I had trouble getting any video content in the article itself).

Legacy Applications and Accessibility A deque.com blog post describing approaches to finding accessibility issues in legacy code; for example, scanning the codebase for positive tab index values (tabindex=”1″ etc). An interesting idea is an ‘accessibility JavaScript file’ that you can include on pages to help fix a11y issues without having to modify the legacy code…. [Read More]

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… [Read More]