Their bionic eyes are now obsolete and unsupported A worrying look at retinal implants provided by Second Sight, which has been in financial difficulty and no longer supports the products. In the early 2000’s, the company produced the Argus I implant, and a second generation Argus II later. The former has a 16 electrode array,… [Read More]

Carousels: No one likes you Joni Halabi gives a breakdown of why carousels are terrible, and why website owners must stop asking developers to build them. The points are pretty conclusive. For one, apparently just 1% of users interact with carousels, and of that tiny percentage, the overwhelming majority simply click on the first slide…. [Read More]

frequent11y returns, after my first trip back to the USA in almost 3 years! Wordle has a colour-blind mode: Here’s how to activate it Did you know that the viral online game Wordle has a mode aimed at colour-blind users? To activate it, go to the settings dial and enable the “high contrast mode” toggle…. [Read More]

Are we live? Scott O’Hara dives deep into ARIA live in this technical post, detailing all the different ways of implementing a live region that inform screen readers that something has updated: You can use specific ARIA region roles: alert, log or status You can use aria-live, with one of the following states: assertive, polite,… [Read More]

Place Your Bets: How Accessible Is PokerStars VR? Accessibility advocates from Equal Entry rated the accessibility of the popular VR game PokerStars VR. The article highlights a couple of articles written by the participants in this area, covering 360 video audio descriptions (which I covered in dai11y 01/01/2021) and VR from a deaf person’s perspective…. [Read More]

Overlay Position and Recommendations The International Association of Accessibility Professionals (IAAP) has published a statement outlining its position on controversial accessibility overlay widgets/plugins. This can be referred to as an authoritative position on the subject, alongside other community efforts such as https://overlayfactsheet.com. It is a short statement, so worth reading fully in its own right…. [Read More]

Giving a damn about accessibility A useful resource for advocates, created by accessibility professional Sheri Byrne-Haber in partnership with UX Collective. The handbook (PDF – 13.3 MB) is beautifully illustrated throughout its 49 pages, and covers the different ‘people challenges’ you will face as an accessibility advocate, and how to overcome them: People who are… [Read More]

EU Runs World’s Largest Accessibility Test A Deque article that is well worth a read. The EU Web Accessibility Directive (issued in October 2016) stipulated that all government agencies in the EU were required to ensure their websites and apps are accessible by June 2021. Every country has to monitor the accessibility of its digital… [Read More]

Be the change you want to see in the world This isn’t an article, but I just wanted to share a story from frequent11y subscriber Nick, who recently contacted me by email. Nick noticed that common electrical items such as extension cords and adapters, sold for consumer use, have important safety information embossed on the… [Read More]

Why Don’t Developers Take Accessibility Seriously? Melanie Sumner writes an engaging CSS Tricks article, exploring different perspectives on web accessibility in 3 ‘acts’: Melanie laments how the accusatory tone of some accessibility advocates doesn’t help. Developers have a lot to learn in their careers beyond just HTML/JS/CSS. In the absence of good accessibility from educational… [Read More]