Category: dai11y

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Survey of Web Accessibility Practitioners #3

• This WebAIM survey, which was previously conducted in 2014 and 2018, is aimed at “everyone that implements accessibility, whether casually or as a primary part of your job”. It is open until January 20th 2021 and its results will be published in the same month. Please take 5-15 minutes of your day to complete the 36 short questions and help inform the web accessibility field.

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Accessibility Testing is like Making Coffee

• This article by Madalyn Parker was very popular back in August. Madalyn describes accessibility testing through different coffee brewing methods, with some nice illustrations. French Press is like automated testing: quick, easy, but doesn’t catch all of the grit. Aeropress, like semi-automated testing, is a step up from that, but requires more judgement. Pour Over is like manual testing, requiring the most time and attention but giving the smoothest brew. Going to a Café is like User Testing: you’ll learn things (either how to make coffee in new ways, or how users with disabilities use your site). a11y.coffee is kind of a sister site to this article and is also worth a look.

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Under-Engineered Responsive Tables

• Adrian Roselli describes how to create an accessible table that scrolls horizontally on mobile. You need to put your <table> element inside a <div role="region" aria-labelledby="mycaption" tabindex="0">, where “mycaption” references the <caption id="mycaption"> that should be inside the table. The tabindex satisfies WCAG Success Criteria 2.1.1 Keyboard, and the aria-labelledby satisfies 4.1.2 Name, Role, Value. For the CSS, apply overflow: auto to the table, and don’t forget to apply a focus style.

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PlayStation 5: The Accessibility Review

Pros:

• The integrated screen reader is available across the PS5 system and comes in multiple languages, which can be adjusted for speed, volume, and choice of male or female voice.
• There are a number of global settings to accommodate different types of colour blindness.
• You can set a ‘game preset’ for game difficulty ranging from Easiest to Hardest, which should map to the standard options in most games. Similarly you can indicate a preference for subtitles, inverted controls, and audio language, which games should obey automatically.
• There are options to increase text size, and to remap your controller.
• 3D Audio, alongside supported headsets, give surround sound to the player, enabling blind players to pinpoint with accuracy where enemies are (as well as improving the experience for everybody).
• The new DualSense controller has a built-in microphone, which can be used for voice-to-text. Haptic feedback in the controllers is designed to immerse the player, but can be disabled if uncomfortable.

Cons:

• The controller is larger and heavier than before, and the accessible ‘Back Button Attachment’ accessory for the PS4’s controller doesn’t fit on this one.
• The ‘zoom’ option that allowed screen magnification on the PS4 has not yet been carried over.

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Accessible Game Design / Accessible Player Experiences

• I came across accessible.games while watching the 2020 Video Game Accessibility Awards. It lists the basic “access design patterns” to follow when developing your games. Examples include “second channel” (such as captioning that alerts you to incoming attacks; not just relying on sound) and “improved precision” (allowing gamers to adjust sensitivity of mouse/controller input). There are also “challenge design patterns”, which are patterns to follow once you’ve got the basics sorted, which go beyond core access into the realm of inclusion, so that people can fully enjoy your game. Examples include “slow it down“, allowing gamers to adjust game speed or reduce enemy damage so that they can successfully progress through the game.

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What would an ethical overlay look like?

• Karl Groves writes about the ‘overlay widgets’ offered by companies such as accessiBe, and how their claim that including their product on your website will make it fully WCAG compliant is simply untrue. Many a11y issues, such as missing alt text, can only be fixed by a person. Moreover, the extra features an overlay often provides (e.g. screen magnification) are poor imitations of what’s already available to the user on their computer. The only ‘ethical’ overlay is a temporary one, Karl says: it should only be used as a discovery tool to find accessibility problems, which you should then spend time fixing the root cause of.

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This $1 hearing aid could treat millions with hearing loss

• Saad Bhamla, a bioengineer from India, wanted to buy his grandparents some hearing aids. He was shocked to find that they can cost $500 to $5000 per pair, so set out to build his own. He soldered a microphone to a circuit board, then added an amplifier, a frequency filter and a volume control, as well as on/off switch and audio jack. His makeshift product, LoCHAid, passes five out of six of the World Health Organization’s recommendations for hearing aids, and cost around $15 to build. This could be reduced to $1 if produced at scale. It needs clinically testing before it can be legally sold as a hearing aid in most countries.

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Atkinson Hyperlegible Font

• A font has been designed to be read more easily by people with low vision. It differentiates commonly misinterpreted letters and numbers, such as capital I and lower-case l, using exaggerated forms including angled spurs and differentiated tails. It comes in four variants (regular, bold, italics, italics bold), supports 27 languages, and is available for free on Windows, Mac and the web.

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GIFS and prefers-reduced-motion

• Some people find animations nausea-inducing or distracting. They might well configure their browser to indicate that they prefer reduced motion. This CSS Tricks article highlights a really neat trick from Manuel Matuzović: display a static image by default, or play an animated gif if users have no preference for reduced motion, using <picture> / <source> elements combined with a media query (see screenshot above). The article goes on to describe how you can use a <details> element to allow gifs to be ‘paused’ (see the demo).

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Soccer players’ head injury risk could be reduced with simple adjustments to the ball, study finds

• Football governing bodies FIFA/NCAA govern the size, weight limit and inflated pressure of footballs. Purdue University engineers have concluded that when footballs get wet, they quickly breach the weight limit, so should be swapped out mid-game. Inflating balls to the lowest allowable pressure can reduce its force by 20%. Adopting these measures could reduce concussion risk, which account for 22% of all soccer injuries. A professional player heads the ball 12 times in a single game and 800 times in a season.

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