Category: dai11y

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From A Colourblind Designer To The World: Please Stop Using Red And Green Together

• A designer with deuteranopia – red/green colourblindness – writes about how the use of green and red in web design is problematic. Namely:
  • Using colour to indicate validation status in forms. Adding other visual indicators such as icons would help to differentiate.
  • Using green and red to indicate primary and secondary actions, e.g. “OK” and “Cancel”. Using fill colour just for the primary action helps to disambiguate.
  • Red and green used to convey meaning in charts – literally unusable for people with colourblindness.
• If you have to use red and green in your design, choose different luminosity (i.e. make either the red or the green darker and saturated). UK traffic lights look quite similar between red and amber, but the green is very distinct because its saturation is different from the other two.
• Colourblindness affects 1 in 12 men and 1 in 200 women.

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The accessibility stalemate

• Chris Heilmann talks about how the accessibility community holds back the accessibility movement by setting the pedestal too high.
• There are plenty of great talks about accessibility, but, apparently, many speakers don’t release their slides afterwards. Why? Because people “call out any accessibility problems with the materials”. If the content isn’t 100% accurate, or the platform has one or two of its own accessibility issues, then the materials don’t get released and people aren’t able to benefit from them.
• Chris says “I saw many conferences not release any of the materials or videos as they couldn’t caption them or host them on a platform that allows for it.” He says that some people enjoy criticising articles for the platform they are published on, e.g. “Isn’t it ironic that I can’t read your article on mobile best practices on my mobile device?”
• “On the surface, it seems to be valid criticism to call out when [presentations] fail to provide alternatives for each image and video in them. Except, it is a cheap shot and feels like a distraction from the problems the materials talked about.”
• Controversially, he suggests that not all content needs to be accessible. “What do we gain by ensuring that a presentation about how people use screen readers is accessible by a screen reader? Is that the audience? The one who already knows this information?”

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Your Image Is Probably Not Decorative

• Eric Bailey explains why most images nowadays need some form of alternative text.
• You can ‘nullify’ images – removing them from the screen reader experience – by adding an empty alt text, i.e. <img alt="" ...>. This should only be used when the image doesn’t convey information that is important to understanding the purpose of the page or view.
• You might nullify your images in the following scenarios:
  • Old layout techniques requiring ‘spacer’ images
  • Where the image repeats content that is already in the page (though this could still be confusing for screen reader users who have partial vision)
  • Supplemental icons (e.g. <button><img alt="" src="icon.svg"> Print</button>).
• Eric also explains how you can provide alt text when using CSS background images (hint: it uses the spacer gif!)

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Accessible Overflow

• A fascinating insight into browser behaviour by Marcus Herrmann. When navigating ‘overflow’ content, i.e. text that doesn’t fit inside its container, this requires us to scroll through the content. Many of us would simply use the mouse wheel to scroll within those containers, but how about users who navigate by keyboard? Keyboard users use the up and down arrows to move up and down the page, but what about the overflow content within the page?
• Firefox automatically puts such content in the tab order, making it reachable and its contents scrollable. In Chrome, Edge and Safari, however, overflow content is not scrollable with a keyboard by default. There is a Webkit issue and a Chrome intent to ship, but otherwise developers are stuck using the following workaround:
  1. Add tabindex="0" to the container
  2. Apply focus styles to the container, e.g. .my-owerflowing-div:focus { outline: 2px solid; }
  3. Add role="region" and supply an accessible name using, for example, an aria-label.
• Adrian Roselli wrote about this in more detail in Keyboard and Overflow.

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Will Accessibility Become Increasingly Important for SEO?

• A deque blog post, with no clear answer – but an interesting topic nonetheless.
• Google has for years made mobile usability and speed a factor in SEO – Search Engine Optimisation – meaning that they favour websites which work well on mobile and load fast, and in turn, rank the website more highly in search results.
• Google states that “everyone should be able to access and enjoy the web. We’re committed to making that a reality”. Google’s Lighthouse tool, which measures website performance and accessibility, provides accessibility scores which could very well lend themselves to an SEO ranking algorithm in the foreseeable future.
• The article acknowledges that there is already a coincidental link between accessibility and SEO. Accessible pages tend to be well marked up pages, containing metadata, descriptive link text and headings, and alt text.

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Microsoft: Accessibility is a focus in Windows 11

• Windows 11, announced at the end of June, is being designed “with accessibility in mind”.
• The OS will include dark, light and customisable themes, and the improved Closed Captions will be more customisable too.
• Microsoft have rebranded the old “Ease of Access” setting to the more idiomatic “Accessibility”, to make it easier to find your settings.
• Like Windows 10, the new OS will include assistive tech including Narrator, Magnifier, Closed Captions, Windows Speech Recognition and Windows Voice Typing.
• Finally, Windows 11 will support Linux applications via something called WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux), which is being carefully developed to integrate with assistive technologies.

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Experimental Brain Implant Lets Man With Paralysis Turn His Thoughts Into Words

• A fascinating article describing how a paralysed man has had a device implanted into his brain, which decodes signals in the brain that once controlled his vocal tract. After several months of training, the system has a vocabulary of 50 words and the man can communicate at a rate of 15 words per minute. Normal speech is in the region of 120-150 words per minute. A professor at Stanford University acknowledges the 50-word vocabulary as a “huge achievement”, but also feels the vocabulary “could easily become 500 or 5,000 words.”
• The anonymous patient in question is in his 30s, and has been unable to speak since a stroke 15 years ago. His arms, legs and vocal tract are paralysed, but the areas of the brain that once issued speech commands are intact. There was initially some doubt that the speech commands in the brain would still work after 15 years without use.
• An ethical dilemma raised in the article is that it will be possible to “eavesdrop” on the brain. We need to ensure that such devices “allow people to be able to think their private thoughts without anything just being broadcast to the world”. This “may be easier with devices that rely on brain signals that control muscles, because these signals generally aren’t sent unless a person makes a conscious attempt at movement”.

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Blind York student wins £5k claim over ‘inaccessible’ loan form

• Disability rights activist Holly Scott-Gardner, has won a settlement after being unable to fill in a student loan disabled students application form, because it was inaccessible to her (as someone who is blind). Holly had to fill in the form over the phone, after several failed attempts online, and successfully sued the company for a breach of the Equality Act 2010.
• Holly wrote a long Twitter thread about her interaction with the company, pointing out that they offered to “work with” her on making their services accessible, but this a) isn’t her area of expertise to be a consultant on, and b) they weren’t offering to pay her for her time. The thread is full of great quotes:
  • “In what world is it acceptable to expect the person who has had their rights violated to come and educate you out of the goodness of their heart?”
  • “I am not a token minority. I do not exist as an educational tool for non-disabled people.”
  • “It’s frustrating that everyone seems to view disabled people as experts on every aspect of being disabled. I know I can’t access something, that doesn’t automatically mean I can fix it.”

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Why debate non-text contrast of UI elements?

• An article by Dave House, describing how WCAG 2.1 Non-text contrast has enough wiggle-room in it that designers often dismiss it, saying “UI elements don’t need to meet this requirement”. He explains: the success criterion states “if the visual indicator of the control is the only way to identify the control, then that indicator must have sufficient contrast”. Therefore, for example, a “Submit” button whose background colour has low contrast is still recognisable with the background colour removed, provided it is in the context of a form, and thus doesn’t fail the criterion.
• Dave suggests a simple test: for every interactive UI element with a contrast of less than 3:1, remove the thing that is low contrast (be it the text, the background colour, the border, etc). Then review the page and see if it still makes sense. The argument is hard to swallow when Dave uses the Facebook and Google landing pages as examples – if they can’t get it right, what chance do the rest of us have? – but it’s a good rule of thumb nonetheless, and a useful design tip to keep in your arsenal.

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Coronation Street highlights the challenges faced by disabled people working from home during the pandemic

• This story focuses on Izzy Armstrong, played by Cherylee Houston. The storyline goes that Izzy is clinically vulnerable and has been shielding and working from home throughout the pandemic. Her job is now at risk as her boss insists she returns to the office.
• The actor Cherylee has in real life been shielding since March 2020, as when she was 23 she was diagnosed with a rare condition called Ehlers-Danlos syndrome.
• This will be the first time viewers will see Izzy in her real-life home environment. The scenes were filmed by Cherylee and her partner at their Manchester home.
• “Izzy Armstrong’s upcoming storyline on Coronation Street highlights the reality of many disabled people’s struggles across the UK.”

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