Accessibility Advocates Sign Open Letter Urging People Not To Use AccesiBe and Other Overlay Products Over 400 accessibility advocates and developers have signed an open letter calling on the industry to avoid using controversial “accessibility overlay products”, the most famous of which is accessiBe. These ‘widgets’ you can install on your website often claim to… [Read More]

Why your brain loves closed captioning 18% of the UK population regularly uses closed captioning, of which only 1 in 5 actually have hearing difficulties. Why? The article cites lots of reasons, such as helping with learning a new language. It can also be useful for people with autism and ADHD by providing “deeper context… [Read More]

fingerspelling.xyz This is a website that gamifies teaching you sign language. It uses your webcam to recognise sign language hand gestures, and works extremely well! You gradually progress through different levels of difficulty, eventually covering the entire alphabet. The game is an initiative by digital creative studio Hello Monday and the American Society for Deaf Children.

Overview of accessibility testing using DevTools (Microsoft) A guide by the Microsoft Edge DevTools team, though almost all of it applies to any modern browser. This mammoth article is a 23 minute read, and covers how to use DevTools for automated accessibility testing, by working through the accessibility ‘warnings’ in the console. It then describes… [Read More]

TikTok Adds New Accessibility Overview To Provide Additional Support for Users TikTok adds photosensitivity warnings to its videos, and allows viewers to opt out of viewing them. It’s also educational; warning labels are shown to creators on the specific effects that may trigger photosensitive epilepsy. TikTok also offers auto captions and text-to-speech tools, and the… [Read More]

This individual shows how he lives his everyday life as a blind person A colleague shared this in our work Slack. Anthony S. Ferraro (asfvsion) demonstrates how he completes everyday tasks as a blind person. He covers the very basics (how to pour a cup of water; by keeping one finger over the rim of… [Read More]

Whose nine is it anyway? (Feedback on the WCAG 2.2 working draft) This article – which I read mostly for the terrible headline – was written by TPGi, an “accessibility solutions provider”, working with a consortium of big names in a11y. TPGi feel that the 9 new Success Criteria recently proposed for WCAG 2.2 all… [Read More]

Our development approach for accessible front-end code This guide by the BBC walks through their approach for implementing front-end changes, e.g. implementing a component. Look at the screen reader UX; ask the UX designer for the required documentation if it is missing. It should cover the focus order, the announced content for screen readers, etc…. [Read More]

Emojis and accessibility: How to use them properly Ryan Tan shares some tips for accessible emoji usage, mostly in terms of screen reader support, and covering a mixture of ‘design tips’ vs ‘everyday content’: Design: on buttons, don’t use emojis to replace words. E.g. use “Like” rather than “👍”, which could be ambiguous. Don’t use… [Read More]

Testing fonts for accessibility Colin Shanley shares the 3 things to bear in mind when choosing a font: Imposters: specific letter shapes that look similar to other shapes can be difficult or impossible to differentiate. For example, lowercase L, uppercase i and the number 1. The image below shows Gill Sans on the left (bad)… [Read More]