Brief Note on Super- and Subscript text Adrian Roselli explores how different screen readers deal with superscript and supscript text. Firstly, it’s useful to note that there are multiple different positions of super/sub script, set using the vertical-align CSS property: baseline is used for representing the lower character in fractions and abbreviations, alongside super for… [Read More]

Designing Better Inline Validation UX Vitaly Friedman writes a lengthy analysis of the different approaches to inline validation. There are places where it is useful and non-controversial, e.g. a password strength indicator, where a live feedback mechanism lets you know whether or not your password is strong or weak as you fill in the field…. [Read More]

Website Slammed for Not Allowing Users To Send Emails if They’re Colorblind Someone in America who tried sending an email to their township (district/council) was unable to, because the anti-spam measures used on the site was not accessible to colour-blind people. It showed a little square box filled with a green colour, and asked the… [Read More]

Abbreviations can be problematic Martin Underhill writes about the problems of using abbreviations such as NGL (“not gonna lie”) and how inaccessible these cultural shortcuts can be. There is an official ‘fix’ for this in HTML: <abbr title=”Not gonna lie”>NGL</abbr>, but it doesn’t show a tooltip when a touchscreen user touches it, nor is it… [Read More]

Accessibility Report July 2022 This is the first ever accessibility report from the Email Markup Consortium, intended to report on the state of a11y in the email industry. 99.9% out of 35,604 HTML emails tested contain accessibility issues categorised as “Serious” or “Critical”. These emails were from multiple industries, in multiple languages (50% non-English). The… [Read More]

Giving your future self a little credit with progressive enhancement This article alludes to the concept of technical credit, which is the antithesis of tech debt. It is the idea that putting in some effort now will make things easier on ourselves in future. The article describes the difference between progressive enhancement and graceful degradation,… [Read More]

Which fonts to use for your charts and tables At first glance, this blog post looks like an advert for the website it’s hosted on: Datawrapper. But it’s packed with informative and useful content, and written by Lisa Charlotte Muth – so let’s dive in. Of course, due to the subject area, some of this… [Read More]

Better accessible names Hidde de Vries shares some great tips for naming your labels and aria-labels: Describe what the thing does, rather than what it looks like, e.g. “Next slide” vs “Arrow right” Frontload the most unique part of the thing, e.g. in a list of albums, use “Midnight Marauders – Album” over “Album –… [Read More]

Improving accessibility with accessibility acceptance criteria A GOV.UK blog post from 2018, describing GDS’s use of ‘acceptance criteria’ for accessibility testing. These criteria are more specific than general WCAG guidance, and concentrate on specific checks to make at the component level for specific components. For example, GDS’ accessible autocomplete component must: be focusable with a… [Read More]

Mac VoiceOver Testing the Simple Way Scott Vandehey writes about a familiar problem: getting comfortable testing with VoiceOver. It’s an experience that can make new users feel, as he puts it, “overwhelmed”. The first issue is with enabling VoiceOver; Scott could never remember the CMD + F5 keyboard shortcut. On newer MacBooks, Scott recommends triple-clicking the… [Read More]