WebAIM Million Report 2023 In March, WebAIM published their annual accessibility report. A number of well-informed folks have read the report and written articles with their key takeaways. Manuel Matuzović picks up on one figure in his post, “50.1% empty links“. The number of websites containing links with no text (usually when linking an image… [Read More]

Everyone Watches TV with Subtitles Now. How’d That Happen? I thought this article was interesting to call out, as in my experience we still often assume captions should be an ‘opt in’ thing. But perhaps things have pivoted to them being ‘opt out’. Indeed, some captions are now ‘on’ by default on social media. In… [Read More]

Flexbox and the Screen Reader Experience A Webaim article that reminds us that whilst CSS flexbox can be used to change the visual order of content, it often has no bearing on how the content is consumed by a screen reader. This can lead to major accessibility issues if the intended reading order differs from… [Read More]

A Practical Approach to Automated Accessibility Mark Steadman writes a mini series on automated accessibility. In this introductory article, Mark introduces his three-step plan for introducing automated accessibility checks into your pipeline: There are a lot of different testing approaches and tools out there, so having a three phase plan for testing is a useful… [Read More]

It’s been a little while since my last fortnight11y, partly because Mailchimp have recently upped their prices, meaning I’m no longer within the free tier. I’ve been procrastinating moving to a different provider, but will give that some more thought. I’ll also be on annual leave for a while now, so you won’t hear much… [Read More]

HTML gains a <search> element This one came up in the work chat. On 24th March, the “WhatWG HTML living standard” gained a new <search> element. It is intended to be used to contain a set of form controls “related to performing a search or filtering operation”. Example code snippet: Functionally, it is the equivalent… [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]

We begin with a Smashing Magazine special! It’s a great publication – which I’ve written for a few times – and I’ve had some of their a11y articles sitting in my bookmarks for a while. These articles are long and full of useful info, so it’s sure to be a bumper week. Let’s dive in!… [Read More]

5 takeaways from screen reader usability interviews Frontend developer Jess Budd shares five things they’ve learned from user testing with screen reader users. Google’s ‘Guided Frame’ helps visually impaired users shoot better pictures This article has been in my bookmarks since the Pixel 7 launch event on October 6th, 2022. Google announced “a number of… [Read More]

Welcome to the first fortnight11y of 2023! I’ve had a nice little break from the newsletter, but am looking forward to getting going again. But first: a big thank you to everyone who completed my survey. It’s really useful knowing what’s most important to you (so much so that I’ll leave it open, in case… [Read More]