How to Use AirPods as Hearing Aids Step by step instructions from OSXDaily, walking through adding the ‘Hearing’ control to your iPhone’s control centre and connecting it to your AirPods. Once connected, you can use the ‘Live Listen’ feature to amplify your surroundings directly into your ears, positioning your iPhone near whatever it is you’re… [Read More]

Gaming Needs Some Basic Accessibility Improvements in 2020 Article by Laura Dale, explaining some of the most commonly requested accessibility features for console gaming (controls remapping, colour blindness support and the ability to adjust text size). A cautionary note about the new PS5 controller, which will have a “resistive trigger” (become harder to press under certain… [Read More]

Access all areas – inside GDS’s accessibility empathy lab A Civil Service World article about the GDS empathy lab comprised of laptops, tablets and phones running assistive technology (and simulated ‘personas’ covered in another GOV.UK blog post), that is available for use by developers at GDS and in the Civil Service. The lab has had… [Read More]

If you ARIA label something, give it a role Article by Marco Zehe, advising that any time you use an aria-label or aria-labelledby attribute, you must also give the thing a role. He suggests that a label without a role is harder to understand: “a div with an aria-label is much more meaningful if it… [Read More]

This advocate redesigned the disability royal commission website so people with a disability can actually use it The Australian Disability Royal Commission website leaves a lot to be desired: overly long, with legal jargon, and a 35-page submission form that required installing Adobe Acrobat before getting started, it was ironically quite inaccessible. Campaigner Sam Connor… [Read More]

Leonardo: an open source contrast-based color generator An in-depth article about leonardocolor.io, a tool that helps you to find colour palettes that conform to the WCAG AA contrast guidelines. It explains the different interpolation algorithms in more detail than I was able to digest, but the really intriguing idea is one of using the NPM… [Read More]

There is no “Myths of Color Contrast Accessibility” A UX Movement article (covered in November) argued that text/background color combinations that fail the WCAG AA contrast threshold can actually be easier to read than those that pass. Geoffrey Crofte has written a counter-article arguing that the methodology of the original article was flawed, proposing his… [Read More]

Scientist regrow ear hairs in discovery which paves the way for a deafness cure A research team at Harvard University have successfully ‘reprogrammed’ the inner ear cells of mice to divide and become hair cells, which are used for hearing. Previous research had already accomplished cell regeneration, but this was the first time in ‘fully… [Read More]

New Library Is a $41.5 Million Masterpiece. But About Those Stairs. A New York Times piece by Sharon Otterman. The newly built Hunters Point Library in Long Island City, New York, is a purpose-built open-plan building with ampitheatre-like seating throughout. But it has only one elevator, which is a bottleneck at peak times: parents and… [Read More]

Responsive Type and Zoom Article by Adrian Roselli, warning about a responsive typography implementation which cleverly resizes font size according to viewport width, but does not take into account browser zoom (which is an issue for a11y). Adrian compares it with his own CodePen, which does not resize based on viewport width but does cope… [Read More]