HTML: The Inaccessible Parts Article by Dave Rupert, sharing his frustration and highlighting some cases where native HTML is not as accessible as it ought to be. Inputs of types number, date and search are considered problematic, as are native HTML <video>, role=”tablist” for tabs and various HTML5 tags. Dave links off to articles explaining… [Read More]

Online Altruists Are Making Reddit More Accessible Fascinating article about the r/TranscribersOfReddit community that has over 3,000 volunteers who have transcribed almost 100,000 pieces of content on Reddit. A bot links to all image/video related content that gets posted to any partnered subreddits, and transcribers then ‘claim’ the post by commenting underneath, before manually providing… [Read More]

Thisten An interesting site/app: “we transcribe conferences, to make them accessible.” It is an audio-to-text platform that transcribes speaker sessions at conferences, in real-time. Designed to be used whether at small gatherings or at large conferences.

Stop Using ‘Drop-down’ Article by Adrian Roselli, asking people to stop using ‘dropdown’ in their vocabulary, as it is ambiguous. Do you actually mean a ‘select’ element, or an ARIA listbox, datalist, ARIA combobox, or autocomplete (or several other possibilities)? Adrian describes the subtle differences in each, and doesn’t preach about the use of ‘select’… [Read More]

Could browsers fix more accessibility problems automatically? Whilst web developers/designers have a duty to make their website accessible, many simply don’t – be it through lack of awareness, skills, resources or empathy. Hidde de Vries proposes that browsers bridge the gap by providing ways of forcing colour contrasts, focus states, text sizes, disabling autoplay and… [Read More]

7 users share their struggles navigating the (sometimes inaccessible) digital world Real users with disabilities sum up their biggest struggles with the digital world. Robert (who has a visual impairment) struggles with date inputs where websites don’t let you enter the date manually, forcing him to navigate an often inaccessible calendar. Rhian, who is autistic,… [Read More]

Why the GOV.UK Design System team changed the input type for numbers Article by Hanna Laakso, explaining why GOV.UK has moved away from using <input type=”number”> for things like credit card / passport numbers. It has big issues in NVDA and Dragon Naturally Speaking, and its native increment/decrement behaviour (triggered by UP/DOWN arrow keys or… [Read More]

https://whocanuse.com A little look at the “Who Can Use” tool, which takes a text color and background color and shows the accessibility of that combination for various vision types. For example, a #CF0000 red against a white background has AA compliance for regular vision, but AAA compliance for those with achromatomaly (partial colour blindness). What’s… [Read More]

These are the standards for new government websites A look at the United States Web Design System (USWDS) released in January, designed to improve the usability and accessibility of federal websites. It encourages focusing on user needs, following user experience guidance and using USWDS components, as per its maturity model. The system meets WCAG 2.0… [Read More]

Make your PowerPoint presentations accessible to people with disabilities A Microsoft guide to ensuring your PowerPoint is accessible. A lot of the guidance is the same as it would be for the web: use descriptive links, don’t use colour alone to convey information, use a decent size text, provide alt text for images. Some more… [Read More]