Are your Anchor Links Accessible? Amber Wilson describes the HTML structure she came up with for turning headings into ‘linkable headings’, whose links can be used as anchor links to that specific part of the page. It can be tricky to implement these without making it a noisy or confusing experience for screen reader users…. [Read More]

iPhones can now automatically recognize and label buttons and UI features for blind users iOS 14 has a new feature, “Screen Recognition”, which is built into VoiceOver. It uses AI to detect interactable elements on the screen, even when such elements aren’t properly labelled / exposed to assistive technology. It has the potential to allow… [Read More]

How we made GOV.UK more accessible A team on GOV.UK analysed a small subset of representative pages to identify any violations of the WCAG 2.1 AA standard. They prioritised each issue by its regularity / likelihood of occurrence and its impact on the user’s ability to use GOV.UK. These were either technical issues, content issues… [Read More]

More Accessible Skeletons Adrian Roselli describes – quite late on in his blog post – why he thinks skeletons (placeholder areas to display to the user while content is loading) are a bad idea. But he also describes how he would build one if he had to. Some skeletons have aria-busy=”true” markup, which is designed… [Read More]

Accessible Web Animation: The WCAG on Animation Explained Val Head gives a detailed overview of WCAG animation recommendations. These include: “Pause, Stop, Hide“: provide a way of pausing, stopping or hiding any autoplaying animation that lasts more than 5 seconds. “Three flashes or below threshold“: avoid flashing more than 3 times in a one second… [Read More]

Here’s What It’s Like To Live With A Tracheostomy Ginny Butcher describes her experience of living with a tracheostomy (or ‘trache’): a tube in her neck, connected to a ventilator to enable her to breathe. She’s completed a master’s degree to become a lawyer, and has done many impressive things such as rock climbing, abseiling,… [Read More]

A plan for accessible maps Benjy Stanton describes how he would design a map service from the ground up, considering the needs of all users. Maps are inherently inaccessible – they require digital and geographic literacy as well as visual methods of communication, so they should always be seen as an enhancement. Benjy’s tips can… [Read More]

My watch told me I have a leak An AbilityNet article describes how Google’s Live Transcribe app, which turns speech into text for live conversations, can also be trained with non-voice data. An update to the app can now identify environmental sounds such as “crying baby”, “door knocking”, “smoke alarm”, or as the title suggests,… [Read More]

Almost 50% Got This #a11y Question Wrong! — WCAG Explained (8m video) Eric Eggert asked Twitter if the following code fails WCAG: <button aria-level=”2″>Action</button> 49% thought it failed WCAG, but Eric explains why it doesn’t. This all may seem a bit hypothetical, but it’s actually quite a useful exercise in how to judge code against… [Read More]

Introducing the Accessibility VRCs A blog post from Facebook’s Oculus team, describing ‘Virtual Reality Checks’ (VRCs), which are technical requirements all apps on the Oculus Platform must meet. It covers things like security, framerates, etc. There is now a set of Accessibility VRCs, which are unfortunately not requirements but “strong recommendations”. A 34m video, “Designing… [Read More]