The only accessibility specialist in the room It’s hard being the only one in your organisation or team responsible for accessibility. If that sounds familiar, I salute you, and this one’s for you. This article by Henny Swan might resonate with some of you. Henny has some advice:

Toggles suck! This somewhat inflammatory headline by AxessLab leads into a very long but enjoyable article about toggle design. The author argues that real world toggles (light switches) work well because: In the digital world, the design doesn’t carry over so well. For setting things like cookie preferences, there is no obvious visual feedback to… [Read More]

Don’t meddle with user input Martin Underhill warns against designs that manipulate user input, and the maxlength attribute in particular, which prevents users from typing anything beyond a certain character limit. Whilst these features are often implemented with the best of intentions – to assist the user in inputting data in the correct format, for… [Read More]

The difference between Increased Contrast Mode and Windows High Contrast Mode (Forced Colours Mode) Martin Underhill describes Increased Contrast Mode (ICM) – a setting that users can opt into, and which website designers/developers can accommodate through a media query: Not a lot of people know about this, or they don’t have it high on their… [Read More]

Become an accessibility champion by using simple mockup annotations “Accessibility annotations” detail interaction design behaviours in UI designs. They communicate the intended experience for keyboard and screen reader users, allowing developers to implement the design just as they would implement a visual one. This speeds up the design QA and development process, but also ensures… [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]

ShatGPT Steve Faulkner gives a frank accessibility review of the ChatGPT UI: Steve goes on to try to ask ChatGPT how it should make the markup more accessible, and is not impressed with the result. But I think the bigger takeaway is that this multi-billion dollar company clearly has little regard for the accessibility of… [Read More]

W3C Design System A redesigned W3C website has launched with a Design System. The design system draws inspiration from the GOV.UK design system and uses some GOV.UK-owned components such as accessible autocomplete. DAC performed accessibility audits of the new W3C website, and their reports can be downloaded from the redesign project website. Thanks to Derren at GDS for sharing this… [Read More]

My Thoughts on Accessibility of NFTs and Web3 Apologies if this is so last year (this post has been in my bookmarks since February 2022, and admittedly we haven’t heard much about Web3 since the rise of ChatGPT). But this article by Crystal Preston-Watson evaluates an emerging and hyped technology for its accessibility, so there’s certainly… [Read More]

What it’s really like to be openly disabled in an interview process: This Medium article is written by Mal: a “multi-disciplinary designer + artist, storyteller, neurodivergent (autist + adhd); she/they”. She shares three interview experiences, two positive and one negative. The first was for an interview last September, in which Mal received the interview questions… [Read More]