Chris Ashton

WCAG 2.2 is published The WCAG 2.2 guidelines have now reached “W3C Recommendation” status. In What’s New in WCAG 2.2, the W3C summarise: The new criteria are made up of:

Getting VoiceOver to shut up Martin (known as “tempertemper”) describes how to quickly pause VoiceOver’s speech: You can also just move to the next bit of content on the page and it’ll start talking again from there. This is useful to know if you’re just wanting to demonstrate something and talk it through with a… [Read More]

Your daily± frequent11y newsletter, brought to you by @ChrisBAshton. ± ok… not quite daily at the moment. I’ve recently started a new job, and also had a bit of annual leave, so I’m still figuring out what kind of cadence I can commit to for this newsletter! Without further ado, I bring you: The case… [Read More]

The five types of people who produce inaccessible code Eric Bailey shares his thoughts, which can be summed up as follows: Eric says that he has been type number five more than he cares to admit. The blog post doesn’t go into more detail, but I think it’s interesting to categorise the different reasons behind… [Read More]

A Deep Dive into Accessibility APIs I’ve read this three-part series by Neill Hadder, who works at Knowbility. Below is a perhaps oversimplified summary – I’d encourage you to click through to the articles themselves if you’re keen to learn more! Part 1: Swinging Through the Accessibility Tree Like a Ring-Tailed Lemur This is an… [Read More]

The ultimate inaccessible UI components This is just a bit of fun from Reddit. Engineers competed to see who could build the worst possible UI. Highlights include: …the list goes on. Images and videos demonstrating the designs are in the article.

I Made a Site Leveraging AI: How Accessible Was It? Interesting experiment by Mark Steadman, who used Durable to generate a website. Using axe-core to scan the site, he found 17 accessibility issues, of which 11 were ‘critical’ and 6 ‘serious’. These included: Manually discovered a11y issues included keyboard focus indicators being highly inconsistent –… [Read More]

Interview with Jamie Knight (and Lion) This landed in my inbox only recently (despite being published in April last year). I remember Jamie from my days at the BBC, so it’s always nice to find out how people are doing! Jamie has autism and mobility issues. Denis Boudreau interviewed Jamie about the accessibility of virtual… [Read More]

Don’t use custom CSS scrollbars Eric Bailey writes a comprehensive article on why you should never, ever provide custom styling for your website’s scrollbars. The post begins somewhat philosophically: Eric highlights the area of a browser window that is your responsibility (the web page) and then highlights what isn’t (the browser ‘furniture’, URL display, and… [Read More]

WebAIM Million Report 2023 In March, WebAIM published their annual accessibility report. A number of well-informed folks have read the report and written articles with their key takeaways. Manuel Matuzović picks up on one figure in his post, “50.1% empty links“. The number of websites containing links with no text (usually when linking an image… [Read More]