Happy New Year! 🎉 Welcome to your first daily dose of a11y in 2020; this one seems quite apt: 7 Predictions for Accessibility in 2020 and Beyond A UsableNet article that is full of optimism for the future: Jason Taylor predicts that a rise in a11y-related lawsuits will drive a more proactive approach to building… [Read More]

Sony’s new Back Button Attachment brings customizable paddles to the DualShock 4 Sony are releasing a $30 attachment for the DualShock 4 controller which slots into the back and provides two extra large buttons. These can be mapped to any of the other buttons on the controller, and could be a (literal) game changer for… [Read More]

Epilepsy Foundation Bombarded with Seizure-Triggering Twitter Posts The Epilepsy Foundation has filed a criminal complaint with the U.S. Attorney and the Office of the State’s Attorney in Maryland, against a number of Twitter uses who maliciously posted seizure-inducing content on its feed. This happened during November: National Epilepsy Awareness month. A similar attack happened in… [Read More]

Accessibility Testing by People with Disabilities An article of two halves, by a11y expert Becky Gibson. The first half gives guidance for performing your own a11y audit. It recommends WAVE as a starting point, followed by the Web Developer extension for validating document structure and numerous bookmarklets for additional automated tests. This is followed by… [Read More]

Your (almost) daily dose of a11y. Apologies for the silence these last few days – I’ve been off sick! Anyway, let’s continue: Screen reader bug fixed in Firefox In September 2018, GDS Accessibility Expert Anika Henke filed a bug report with Mozilla, suggesting that words are incorrectly merged together in screen readers when using word-wrap:… [Read More]

Mattel releases first deck of UNO in Braille The first official braille UNO deck is going to the Idaho School for the Deaf and the Blind. Some students have played it before but have needed to have teachers adapt existing sets by hand braille-ing them. The braille deck looks identical to the non-braille deck, but… [Read More]

What to Do If You Think Your Child Is Color Blind Around 1 in 10 males have some form of colour blindness – a much higher rate than that in women. It’s a genetic trait typically passed down from the mother. You can conduct Ishihara tests at home (online) to determine colour blindness. There is… [Read More]

The Physics (and Economics, and Politics) of Wheelchairs on Planes A detailed article highlighting the stress of flying as a wheelchair-user, involving being picked up and strapped into an ill-fitting seat while your wheelchair is put in the hold (and subsequently lost or damaged in transit, as happens in a lot of cases). The principle… [Read More]

‘No captions no vote’: why deaf voters are calling for more accessible campaigning this general election Article by Liam O’Dell, highlighting that a lot of political campaign videos lack captions, making them inaccessible to the 11 million people in the UK (1/6 of the population) with deafness or hearing loss (not to mention that 85%… [Read More]

Making a Better Custom Select Element A ‘how-to’ guide from accessibility expert Julie Grundy. It describes the drawbacks of the native <select> element – the lack of autocomplete, the inflexibility around what can appear inside each <option>. Julie talks us through building a custom select, avoiding the accessibility pitfalls that many custom select components fall… [Read More]