The Web Needs a Native .visually-hidden This fantastic article by Ben Myers dives into the user need for textual content that is only available to assistive technologies, e.g. Ben describes how we’ve arrived at the current standard implementation of ‘visually-hidden’ class: But this approach is hacky, trying to visually hide text without removing them from… [Read More]

A beginner’s complete guide to form accessibility: the 5 things accessible forms needs and how to fix common errors This is a handy guide to forms, covering the basics you need to get right: Each of these is covered in more detail further on in the article. The most interesting section is the one on… [Read More]

Here, here, and here Martin Underhill digs into the issues associated with a writing style we’ve all seen on the web. Someone might write “You can find some songs I like [here], [here] and [here]”, where each “here” is a link to a separate song. If you work in the field of accessibility, you’re likely… [Read More]

You Can Make Your Giant iPhone Easier to Use With One Hand A lifehacker article listing several things to try if you’re finding it uncomfortable trying to use a large iPhone display. I like these articles for discovering accessibility features I didn’t know existed. There’s nothing particularly new to me on this list (except the… [Read More]

Progressively-enhanced dark mode Darin Senneff writes an incredibly in depth article about his progressively enhanced dark mode toggler. Darin opts for a HTML form with three radio buttons: ‘auto’, ‘light’ and ‘dark’. The ‘auto’ option looks at the user’s operating system level preferences, i.e. serving light mode by default, but with a prefers-color-scheme media query… [Read More]

Screen Readers support for text level HTML semantics Steve Faulkner writes about accessibility support for HTML tags such as <strong> (and <b>), <em> (and <i>), and <del>, <ins> and <mark>. (He performed the same analysis 15 years ago – things have moved on a bit since then). For strong/emphasised text, there is no audible distinction… [Read More]

Meet the first-ever accessibility engineer at The Washington Post The Washington Post hired Holden Foreman in January. Holden is keen to stress that whilst he is the first person at the newspaper with the ‘Accessibility Engineer’ title, accessibility is not a new concept there and the lack of formal roles at smaller news organisations does… [Read More]

Progressive enhancement poem in the style of Shakespeare In more a11y ChatGPT news, my colleague Derren Wilson asked ChatGPT to “explain progressive enhancement in the style of shakespeare”, and I’m absolutely gobsmacked at the results. Enjoy. Hark! What light through yonder window breaks?It is the concept of Progressive Enhancement,That doth illuminate the web with its… [Read More]

Chris’s look at ChatGPT I’ve had a few ChatGPT related accessibility articles in my inbox of late – I’ve read them and summarised them so you don’t have to! In “How ChatGPT can help your code be accessible“, Ashley Smith describes how you can use ChatGPT to give you some markup as a base to… [Read More]

Twitter is getting rid of its free API tier. That’s a nightmare for accessibility activists. Twitter has announced that, starting February 9, they will no longer support free access to the Twitter API (both v1.1 and v2). This move has not been popular, including with myself – basic things like the automatic tweeting of my… [Read More]