Your daily frequent11y newsletter, brought to you by @ChrisBAshton. This is a longer summary than usual but I wanted to do the article justice. Renting while disabled: ‘Being in a wheelchair means I pay double the rent’ 93% of the UK’s 8.5 million rental properties are inaccessible. It’s up to local authorities to set and… [Read More]

webhint.io Webhint is an OpenJS Foundation project backed by Microsoft, that lints your website for accessibility, speed and cross-browser compatibility. It can be installed as a CLI tool, a browser extension, or run directly from the webhint scanner page. I tried it on one of my sites and though it didn’t find any accessibility issues,… [Read More]

Accessible HTML toggle buttons Erik Kroes describes his accessible toggle switch, which makes use of a <button> with role=”switch” and aria-checked=”true” attributes. He chose <button> because “I want something to change instantly which a checkbox really should not be doing. In my experience, checkboxes that change things often clash with WCAG Criterion 3.2.1: On Focus…. [Read More]

Here are a couple of interesting articles focused on accessibility law suits in the USA, but well worth a read wherever you live: Expert witnesses in web accessibility cases (Part 1) and Expert witnesses in web accessibility cases (Part 2). In Part 1, Ken Nakata describes the Daubert standard of expert witness testimony, which requires… [Read More]

Virusdogs On BBC Radio 4 this morning, they were talking about how dogs can be trained to detect coronavirus in humans, and could be used for mass screenings at places like airports and train stations. Each dog takes around 8 weeks to train, and can process 250 people per hour. This initiative is still at… [Read More]

How studying fruit flies might help us prevent age-related hearing loss in humans Fruit flies are prone to age-related hearing loss – just like humans, whose molecular pathways of hearing are very similar – maintaining their sensitive hearing for about 85% of their 58 day lives. The article goes into more scientific detail than I’m… [Read More]

VoiceOver on iOS 14 Supports Description Lists This isn’t the first time I’ve talked about iOS 14, but Adrian Roselli highlights a lesser known improvement the update brings: support for <dl> description lists. Now, in some contexts, terms and definitions are read sensibly, e.g. “louche, term. ‘not reputable or decent’, definition”. In other contexts, such… [Read More]

Work In Progress: Tabbing Order in the Accessibility Panel Firefox are adding a devtools feature which highlights all focusable elements and the order in which they will be tabbed. To view, download the Nightly version of Firefox, open the devtools, switch to the Accessibility panel, and check the “Show Tabbing Order” option. It’s not yet… [Read More]

Tech volunteers develop new online tool to help visually impaired access COVID-19 data The ‘Scottish Tech Army’ have created a dashboard of COVID-19 statistics in Scotland, which, in a ‘world first’ uses ‘sonification’ to interpret visual data as sound. This enables screen reader users to get an idea of the general trend of a chart,… [Read More]

a11yresources A curated list of a11y resources by Hannah Milan. Browse browser extensions, bookmarklets, checklists, colour picker tools, articles, and even other accessibility focused newsletters (I won’t be offended 😉).