‘May be an image’: What it’s like browsing Instagram while blind Kait Sanchez writes about the experience of screen reader users on social media. The auto generated alt text for photos on Instagram and other sites is often poor: “two brown cats lying on a textured surface” turned out to be a woman in a… [Read More]

A Deep Dive on Skipping to Content Paul Ratcliffe describes a “2021-friendly” implementation of a skip link. It looks something like this (note that the text is hidden visually until it is focused – I’ve omitted this from the code below): <a href=”#skip-link-target”>Skip to main content</a> <a href=”#skip-link-target” id=”skip-link-target”>Start of main content</a><main>the content</main> Paul points… [Read More]

What people should know BEFORE writing articles or creating products about accessibility Sheri Byrne-Haber writes about getting disabled users involved in your product development early on. It is possible to build a product that is technically accessible but is inefficient and unusable in practice. “You cannot retrofit lived experience”. Some products don’t support an intersectionality… [Read More]

It is time to ditch the title “Evangelist” from Accessibility Ronise Nepomuceno explains why she hates the term ‘Accessibility Evangelist’: It reinforces the idea that accessibility is a ‘nice to have’ that can be deprioritised It has its roots in tech in the 1980’s, when Apple put together a team to ‘evangelise’ developers to develop… [Read More]

Twitter’s new design to get fix after headache complaints BBC article from 16th August. Highlights: “Twitter is making changes to its new redesign, after users complained of headaches and discomfort.” “Unveiled only last week, the redesign mainly involved high-contrast colours and a custom-designed font, Chirp.” Its aim was to “improve content consumption and clean up… [Read More]

Writing great alt text: Emotion matters Jake Archibald describes how he was trying to decide what alt text to use for his avatar, which would appear alongside his name, in a list of conference speakers. His (and my) instinct was that it should be nullified (alt=””) because it would otherwise be repeating information elsewhere in… [Read More]

A day in the life: What it’s like to travel through an airport and on a plane as a wheelchair user An interesting read about just what a wheelchair user goes through on a typical flight. These users must be transferred into a narrow aisle chair (designed to be able to fit in the aisle… [Read More]

Move the pointer using head pointer on Mac This is a macOS user guide for how to enable the ‘head pointer’ on your Mac, using your built-in camera to follow your head movement and move your cursor. I was pointed to this via Stefan’s Web Weekly newsletter. It’s quite effective and worth experimenting turning it… [Read More]

Tech platform devises new system to simplify process of booking rail travel for disabled travellers Whoosh Media have created a system, “The Real-Time Journey Dashboard”, that allows you to scan QR codes on your train seat, to view information such as location of toilets on the train, as well as a live dashboard demonstrating journey… [Read More]

New in ARIA 1.2: ARIA IDL attributes Scott O’Hara writes about the new ARIA IDL (Interface Definition Language) attributes, allowing you to set element attributes succinctly in JavaScript via foo.role = ‘checkbox’ and foo.ariaChecked = false. Until now, we’ve had to use setAttribute, i.e. foo.setAttribute(‘aria-checked’, ‘false’). This is supported in all Chromium browsers, but currently… [Read More]