Rail stations across Great Britain receive £20 million funding boost for accessibility improvements 124 stations in Great Britain will gain new lifts, accessible toilets and/or improved customer information screens. A list of affected stations appears at the bottom of the page.

Screen readers and cookie consents In this video from the London Web Performance Group this month, Léonie Watson demonstrates that by using headings to navigate with a screen reader, she never encounters the GDPR cookie notice on a lot of websites. And if she does, it’s often difficult to figure out what she’s consenting to…. [Read More]

Building an accessible autocomplete control Adam Silver explains in detail how to build an accessible autocomplete component, taking into account the noJS experience, announcing results to screen readers, hiding suggestions ‘on blur’, keyboard support and endonym/typo support. It’s always surprising just how complicated autocompletes can be, and this is a really good example of one… [Read More]

Proper VoiceOver support coming soon to Firefox on MacOS Mozilla announces that by the end of June, Firefox should have basic support for MacOS VoiceOver. By the end of the year, the experience should be improved for visually impaired VoiceOver users, including live region support and rotor item support. The post goes into detail about… [Read More]

WCAG 2.1 and PDF Accessibility Lots of useful reminders. Something that conforms to WCAG 2.1 AA will also conform to WCAG 2.0 AA. Line height should be at least 1.5 times font size; spacing following paragraphs should be at least 2 times; letter spacing at least 0.12 times; word spacing at least 0.16 times. JavaScript… [Read More]

Celebrate Global Accessibility Awareness Day with GDS GDS is running a conference this Thursday 21st May, with registration closing at 5pm on the 20th. Agenda: 9:30am “An introduction to digital accessibility regulations”, 11am “How to avoid common accessibility statement fails”, 12:30pm “How to carry out basic accessibility checks”, 3pm “Making accessibility accessible: the secret to… [Read More]

Supporting users who change colours on GOV.UK A post from 2018 that resurfaced recently and still has lots of great tips. GOV.UK uses the CSS triangle method to create a back link component whose triangle arrow icon renders even when the user has overridden their colours. The site logo was once a PNG, but under… [Read More]

AI Is Not Similar To Human Intelligence. Thinking So Could Be Dangerous Dr Elizabeth Fernandez gives three reasons why AI is not the same as human thought. 1) they’re easy to fool: a neural network might correctly classify an image as a banana, but introduce a slight amount of noise and it might re-classify it… [Read More]

The Complete Guide to Accessibility for WordPress Websites Post on deque.com highlighting that WordPress powers 35% of websites and its accessibility greatly depends on the themes and plugins you have installed. There are a number of themes explicitly tagged as “Accessibility Ready”, although you should manually test too as quality varies. The new WordPress editor… [Read More]

When (not) to use the <br> element Šime Vidas shares a helpful reminder that the <br> line break element is useful in some cases. Whilst web developers have generally moved away from <br> use – seeing line breaks as presentation, not content, and therefore using CSS instead – it should still be used when line… [Read More]