Managing focus in the shadow DOM Web developer Nolan Lawson writes about the difficulties of managing focus on a web page which makes use of the shadow DOM; parts of the page that are encapsulated and unable to be interacted with programmatically in the same way as regular DOM elements. If you’re implementing a modal dialog,… [Read More]

Coursera accessibility courses A recommendation by my colleague Stephanie Hill: “Top Web Accessibility Courses” by Coursera. Some interesting ones highlighted below. Design: An Introduction to Accessibility and Inclusive Design Web Design for Everybody Capstone Foundations of User Experience (UX) Design Basics of Inclusive Design for Online Education Testing: Test Accessibility of your Design with A11ygator… [Read More]

Accessible design: How much motion is too much motion? Heather Waroff, Senior Designer at Microsoft, writes about interaction design. The most useful part of the article for me was the list below, developed “in conjunction with Accessibility specialists”. It describes the types of motion that are considered safe (good), risky (‘it depends’), and non-compliant (bad)…. [Read More]

Screen Reader User Survey #9 Results The famous WebAIM survey this year had 1568 responses, mostly from North America and Europe, with a pretty even age split. 92.3% of respondents said they have a disability, almost 80% of which was blindness. 57.5% of respondents class themselves as “advanced” screen reader users, versus 37.4% “intermediate” and… [Read More]

Kellogg’s: a game changer in accessible packaging In partnership with RNIB, Kellogg’s has trialled including NaviLens codes on its packaging, giving visually impaired customers a way of scanning products to find out their ingredients, allergen and recycling information. NaviLens codes work in a similar way to QR codes, but can be detected “in a fraction… [Read More]

Online Instruction Did Not Make Things Easier for Disabled Students An interesting article, worth reading as it goes against the current narrative that the disabled community have benefited from the move to online tuition. It covers university undergraduates and graduates in America. “Only 20% of [American] undergraduate students with disabilities reported enjoying online learning, and… [Read More]

Practical accessibility, part 2: Name (almost) everything It’s not enough to just use semantic markup to, say, create a list in HTML (the “what”), and mark it up with a role=”menu” (the “how it’s supposed to work”). We also often need to label the list, to explain “why” it’s there. For example, an aria-label=”Main menu”… [Read More]

Accessible SVGs Think you know SVGs? This article is worth a read – you just might learn something. SVGs have an implicit WAI-ARIA role of “graphics-document“. You should only change this if the SVG only contains an image; an attribute of role=”img” or role=”graphics-symbol” would be appropriate. Hide decorative SVGs from screen readers using aria-hidden=”true”… [Read More]

What Happens When a Blind Person Test Drives VoiceOver Recognition? An article by Rhea Althea Guntalilib, describing her experience of using the new “VoiceOver Recognition” features of iOS 14. It is a collection of tools including “Screen Recognition” (which I’ll talk about below), “Text Recognition” (which detects text found in images) and “Image Descriptions” (which… [Read More]

Blind Accessibility Tips blindaccessibilitytips.com is a resource for visually-impaired people to learn how to use assistive technology. It covers tasks like navigating the web, editing content in Microsoft Word, and using Windows File Explorer. The site is focused on Windows users using JAWS or NVDA. Though still clearly in early development, it’s a nice attempt… [Read More]