Category: dai11y

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Accessible Fonts: Please, STOP Using PX For Screen!

• A very ranty article that nevertheless explains quite well the reasons for using em (rather than px) for your font sizes, media queries, margins and padding. It dispels the myth that the ‘default’ font size is always 16px (the author’s default is 20px). rem is argued against as theme changes have to be applied in more places. pt, mm, cm and other ‘real-world’ metrics have their place only in your print styles.

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What is ARIA even for? (video, ~8 mins)

• A quirky, almost NSFW video by Heydon Pickering, explaining when and why to add ARIA roles and attributes to your HTML. It is best used when there is no good native HTML solution to your problem. For example, a ‘toggle button’ could be achieved with checkboxes, but is difficult to style and would be announced as input to the screen reader: better to use <button aria-pressed="false">Toggle</button> and use JavaScript to change the aria-pressed value. And <button> already has an implicit role="button", so there is no need to add it here.

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6 Ways Travel Has Become More Accessible During the Pandemic

1. Flexible booking & cancellation policies (to encourage people to book flights etc; those who have bouts of debilitating medical symptoms have long requested more flexibility).
2. More accessibility fixes on websites (due to suffering businesses trying to market to more customers).
3. A move toward contact-free (e.g. more automatic doors, less paperwork, less face-to-face check-in).
4. Public spaces easier to navigate (lack of crowds, increased spatial awareness).
5. Increased local offerings (some hotels & tour operators are extending discounts to residents, in the absence of out-of-town visitors).
6. Events with virtual access (business conferences, concerts etc, which prior to the pandemic would not have allowed participation from a distance)

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Accessible Routing in JavaScript Frameworks

• A Deque article by Mark Steadman, describing how to handle transitions between page loads in Single Page Applications. Ideally the focus would go to a <h1>, or failing that, it should go to the body of the page. In either case, the focussed element needs a tabindex="-1" so that JavaScript can assign focus. As a last resort, you could instead shift focus to the “skip to main content” link if you have one, but should also use aria-live to announce to the screen reader that the page has changed.

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Sony Outlines PS5 And DualSense Accessibility Features

• Sony has released a blog post describes the PS5’s new accessibility features, such as built-in screen reader, and voice dictation software. Gamers will be able to adjust colour contrast on subtitles/closed captions, and reduce or disable haptic feedback in the DualSense controllers. Well done to the lucky few who have managed to pre-order one so far (I haven’t, and it baffles me why it’s so difficult)! PS5 is released on November 19th in the UK.

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Use feature flags to make your website more accessible

• Interesting idea from Heidi Waterhouse: allow users of your app to set their preferences for things like font size, contrast, and font family, and persist these preferences in a database [or cookie]. Then, when rendering the page for the returning user, retrieve their preferences and give them a personalised, accessible display. Heidi recommends building in these flags for every new feature, even if you haven’t built the part that lets users configure it yet (just return the default value). When you do come to implement it, your UI will already be set up to give the personalised view.

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The Robot That Gives Humans a Job (video, 3 minutes)

• At the “Avatar Robot Cafe” in Tokyo, all of the servers are robots – but this isn’t the typical story of automation taking peoples’ jobs. These robots are controlled by people outside of the cafe who would never be able to physically do the job otherwise. Massa – the avatar that serves Alice Levine in the clip – has severe physical disabilities that confine him to his bed. But he can control the robot waiters using sophisticated eye tracking technology, and can talk to customers to take their orders and have a conversation. The arrival of 5G could soon mean he can send his robot to any location, indoor or out. It provides Massa “a huge amount of hope”.
• Watch the full episode of Kevin McCloud’s Rough Guide to the Future on Channel 4 (47 minutes).

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That Time I Tried Browsing the Web Without CSS

• Jon Kantner describes his experience with some popular sites after turning off CSS. 12.5% of users with low vision (who use assistive technology) browse the web with custom stylesheets, so sites need to have good structural markup to build upon. The most common issues Jon encountered were: images/SVGs with no width/height attributes, so appeared massive on the screen; lack of whitespace between elements (sites rendering <a>Link 1</a><a>Link 2</a>, not marked up as a list); unlabelled buttons (which would also be a huge problem for voice input or screen reader users); and missing images (e.g. logos applied with CSS background-image).
• Did you like this article? I’ve written a number of similar posts on Smashing Magazine.

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Developing Real-Time, Automatic Sign Language Detection for Video Conferencing

• Google intern Amit Moryossef writes about a research paper on real-time sign language detection using human pose estimation. The model, called PoseNet, reduces input from a HD image to a small set of landmarks on the user’s body, which can be analysed frame-to-frame to predict whether a user is signing, to an accuracy of 83-92% – you can try this for yourself in the demo or watch the video.
• As conferencing software tends to focus on someone who is speaking verbally, it is hoped sign detection could be used to move focus to someone communicating via sign language. The researchers found a clever way of triggering the focus: when the model determines that a user is signing, it passes an ultrasonic audio tone. The audio is transmitted at 20kHz, which is outside the hearing range for humans, but fools any video conferencing application into thinking the user is speaking. This research could be used to better include those who communicate via sign language.

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Math, schizophrenia and the story of a life saved by the Internet

• A US podcast sent in by frequent11y subscriber Nick. It’s an anonymous interview with someone who has schizophrenia. Whilst studying to become a mathematician, they were faced with severe anxiety attending the face-to-face lectures, so asked if they could just do the assignments and skip the classroom parts. They were told “no”. After dropping out of school and reaching suicidal lows, they enrolled in an online-only degree, graduated, and now have a lucrative full-time job. They hope that the pandemic leads to academia becoming more remote-friendly and accommodating of mental health.
• (The relevant portion is about 31 minutes into the podcast, or you can switch to the Transcript tab and search for “coming up, math” to find the relevant portion.)

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