Tips for Making HTML Lists Accessible This article is a quick reminder on HTML list markup. First of all, decide whether you actually need a list; sometimes it is better to format your content as paragraphs with headings instead. This way, assistive technology users can easily skip to the heading that they want to read…. [Read More]

Improving The Accessibility Of Your Markdown Another excellent Smashing Magazine article by Eric Bailey. Despite the title, there aren’t many Markdown-specific accessibility tips here, but it is packed with information and I challenge you not to learn something new from it! Markdown is a text to HTML conversion language, created in 2004. It has no… [Read More]

Facebook Rolls Out News Feed Change That Blocks Watchdogs from Gathering Data An update to Facebook, which has not yet been rolled out to all users, obfuscates the page content in the markup of the HTML DOM, potentially excluding disabled users. It adds “superfluous text to news feed posts in the form of ARIA tags” (“junk… [Read More]

An update on the accessibility of conditionally revealed questions A GOV.UK blog about the ‘conditional reveal’ option in the GDS Design System’s radio and checkbox components. The GOV.UK Accessibility Team discovered that the implementation failed WCAG 2.1 Success Criterion 4.1.2: Name, Role, Value, as the act of conditionally revealing content would not notify some screen… [Read More]

Axe-core vs PA11Y: Which one should you choose? GitLab now offers Pa11y as part of its CI pipeline, with no configuration needed. Craig Abbott compares it to axe-core, which is used by Deque for its acceptance tests. Out of 142 issues tested: axe-core found 39 issues in total, or 27%. 36 were violations and 3… [Read More]

In Quest of Search Sara Souedian gives her thoughts on why we need a native <search> HTML element. This would be syntactic sugar for <div role=”search”>, like we already have for <main> / <div role=”main”>. The first rule of ARIA is to not use it if there is a native HTML element with the semantics… [Read More]

Some questions on accessibility in email — answered Some interesting nuggets of information here, resulting from a survey of 162 respondents (yes, the sample size is too small to have a lot of confidence in these results). 98% of people find a font size of 16px easy to read, compared to 70% for 14px (a… [Read More]

Audio killed the video call An interesting article talking about the progression from, pre-pandemic, video-calls happening once or twice a week, to mid-pandemic, where video calls happen for several hours per day. The video fatigue has led to an explosion in popularity for audio-based apps, such as Clubhouse, where users can drop into chatrooms and… [Read More]

Don’t Believe the Type! (video, 50m) I discovered this axe-con 2021 video via Richard Morton’s tweet. I thought it would be good to follow-up on the piece I wrote about the Hyperlegible font. The presentation, by Gareth Ford Williams, David Bailey and Bruno Maag, talks through the data they’ve gathered from around 7,000 hours of… [Read More]

Doctor’s orders: ‘Nature prescriptions’ see rise amid pandemic A really interesting article about how a growing number of doctors – particularly pediatricians – in the USA are prescribing walks in the park. The prescriptions are “specific, just like an antibiotic”, with patients told how often they should go, and where. One doctor gave their patient… [Read More]