How we created a reporting tool to improve the accessibility of GOV.UK Avision Ho, a data scientist at GDS, describes how their team built a tool to check half a million GOV.UK pages for some specific WCAG failures. They concentrated on 8 problems, including non-semantic headers (paragraph text styled with bold, mimicking the style of… [Read More]

Android update adds scheduled texts and improves accessibility Whilst Android 12 will likely be released in September 2021, a first developer preview is out now. One accessibility improvement is that you will be able to make calls, set timers and play music from the lock screen, using Android’s ‘Assistant’. This will benefit those with mobility… [Read More]

5 Ways You’re Not Making Your Website Accessible A listicle by Twan Mulder, which I wasn’t expecting to learn anything from – but then I learned something from the very first point! It was this: You often need to denote the ‘current’ page in navigation, and you see this in the wild with class=”active” or… [Read More]

How to start testing screen reader support using VoiceOver Article by Yakim van Zuijlen, describing how to use VoiceOver on a Mac to test your website. It’s aimed at beginners, but goes into quite a lot of detail, including how to find items by type (e.g. blockquote). There are some beautiful, clear illustrations throughout the… [Read More]

12 Common Words and Phrases You May Not Realise Are Ableist Some of these seem fairly obvious, but others less so. With respect to autism, “high or low functioning” is an ableist term I hadn’t considered. ‘Differently abled’ and ‘special needs’ are also poor euphemisms for the term ‘disabled’. ‘Tone deaf’ and ‘blind spot’ are… [Read More]

ProPublica experiments with ultra-accessible plain language in stories about people with disabilities News organisation ProPublica ‘translated’ one of their articles into plain language, in an effort to be more accessible to people with intellectual/developmental disabilities. Here’s the original article: People with Developmental Disabilities Were Promised Help. Instead, They Face Delays and Denials. And here’s the… [Read More]

Accessibility auditing and ego A very popular article among a11y newsletters at the moment. Eric Bailey reminds us that WCAG is a standard, that sets “objective criteria for what is and is not accessible”. In other words, you might hate the design of a website, but it might conform to all WCAG criteria. Don’t creatively… [Read More]

Infinite Scroll: What Is It Good For? Article exploring the pros and cons of infinite scroll. The pros were simply “seamless mobile scrolling” and “serendipitous browsing”. The cons were numerous: Could contribute to social media addiction. Might make sidebars and other content inaccessible to assistive technology users. Makes footers impossible to reach. Causes users to… [Read More]

The Readability Group – Survey The Readability Group is a collection of experts in design and accessibility. Their mission is to “optimise typographic accessibility by providing expert advice based on data, not anecdote”. Essentially, they want to gather real user feedback on the readability of typography. Please take around twenty minutes of time to contribute… [Read More]

Glove translates sign language in real-time – ’99 percent recognition rate’ A Daily Express article from last summer. Bioengineers at the University of California have developed a glove that can translate sign language into speech in real-time, using an accompanying smartphone app. The glove has thin sensors running to the fingertips, which can detect motions…. [Read More]