Imagining native skip links A proposal by Kitty Giraudel that is so brilliant, it’s a wonder it hasn’t been thought of and implemented already: native skip links. Every website ought to have a “Skip link” link as the first thing a keyboard user tabs to in the page. This is important for keyboard users and… [Read More]

The Automated Accessibility Coverage Report (PDF) Thanks to GDS colleague Anika Henke, who discovered this report via the “Accessibility Testing Coverage: Automation and Intelligent Guided Testing” talk at axe-con. According to the report, Deque’s accessibility testing engine axe-core finds 57.38% of accessibility issues, rather than the “widely accepted belief that automated accessibility testing only provides… [Read More]

Inaccessibility Warnings in the Browser anyone? An interesting proposal by Martin Mengele: should we show warnings in the browser when a site is deemed to have accessibility issues? The warning about insecure connections, which all modern browsers now display prominently when connecting over HTTP, helped to drive a large HTTPS adoption; Martin argues that an… [Read More]

WordPress.org Removes Fake Reviews for AccessiBe Plugin Accessibility consultant Joe Dolson noticed a pattern amongst the reviews for the accessiBe WordPress plugin, which had 31 five-star reviews, 2 four-star reviews and 2 one-star reviews. Many of the accounts of the positive reviews had interacted with some of the same plugins, and tended to be one-sentence… [Read More]

Gold Nanoparticles Inside Contact Lenses Correct Color Blindness Researchers in the United Arab Emirates have developed contact lenses that could help correct red-green colour blindness. The lenses are created with gold nanocomposites and hydrogel, creating pink-tinted lenses. These could be a popular alternative to tinted eyewear. The next steps will involve human trials.

Hiding Content Responsibly Kitty Giraudel writes about the HTML attributes and CSS properties commonly used to ‘hide’ content, either visually or from assistive technologies (AT), or both. They then go into detail on each one: An sr-only class is great for visually hiding something while preserving it for AT. aria-hidden is great for hiding content… [Read More]

Amazon Echo Show 8 extends the power of Alexa to people with disabilities An article from last November, reviewing the accessibility of Amazon’s Echo Show 8. It highlights a bunch of accessibility features I’d never considered the Echo devices to have: Like phones and tablets, it has a pinch-and-zoom feature to allow you to magnify… [Read More]

Accessible motion: why it’s essential and how to do it right Stephanie Cree shares some good UX tips for making your motion accessible: Keep animation at the point of focus, to prevent zoomed in users from missing it outside the part of the page they’re zoomed in on. Avoid flashes more than 3 times per… [Read More]

Material Design Text Fields Are Badly Designed Smashing Magazine article by Adam Silver, describing what’s wrong with the text fields in Material Design (Google’s design system). Material Design uses “float labels”: text that appears in the input, like a placeholder, but moves above the input when you focus on the element. This is better than… [Read More]

The no-mouse challenge: Taking the keyboard navigation red pill^ Denis Boudreau describes “the no-mouse challenge”: start a timer, open a website and see how long it takes you to run into a brick wall. Participants in his workshops are “blown away” at the brittle nature of the web once you go off the beaten track of… [Read More]