Category: dai11y

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 enforce accessibility targets, but just 5% are requiring developers to construct wheelchair-suitable housing.
• Finding an accessible home is difficult as property websites lack accessibility filters, and estate agents are often useless. Habinteg Housing Association are hoping to launch an ‘online accessible property directory’, but it’s unclear from the article what scope it will have. There’s certainly a business opportunity here for someone to build the Rightmove of accessible housing.
• The Equality Act 2010 gives wheelchair users the right to make adaptations to their rented homes, but changes must be ‘reasonable’ (giving room to landlords to say no) and they must intend to live in the property for at least 5 years, making this unviable for many young renters.
• These adaptations cost on average £9,000, with a means-tested Disabled Facilities Grant covering only some of that cost. Life costs £583 per month more on average if you are disabled.

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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, it found a lot of redundant meta tags which I should consider removing. A talk by Rachel Weil includes a live demonstration of the usage.

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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. A aligns better with the goal of instant change”. It’s always interesting to see how different devs approach this problem.

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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 that a scientific methodology is followed (peer-review, standards followed, widespread acceptance within the community, etc). Testimonies fail because they’re too high level, describing a general audit, which is “not a sufficient replacement for a proper explanation of overall methodology and process” [pertaining to this specific case].
• In part 2, Ken gets more specific. Many testimonies fail because they’re too broad, describing all the WCAG issues encountered, as that’s what accessibility specialists are used to doing in their reports. They should instead concentrate solely on issues that caused the plaintiff to “suffer injury”, where the “injury can be traced to the defendant’s illegal conduct”. So a blind person can sue a site where they were unable to purchase a product (the injury) if the site has not been built to be accessible to a screen reader (the illegal conduct). On the other hand, a blind person couldn’t sue a site for having a video missing captions because lack of captioning alone should not injure the blind plaintiff; a deaf plaintiff would have more grounds.

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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 the early feasibility study stage, and is asking for volunteers who have recently tested positive for coronavirus to apply for a training pack. The pack contains a mask and a T-shirt to wear for a few hours, and a prepaid envelope to return the worn contents to ARCTEC for training. A successful program could re-enable global travel.

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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 able to summarise here, but the TLDR is that gene therapies have been applied to fruit flies such that older flies had hearing capabilities similar to younger flies. The same approach could in theory be applied to humans.

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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 as in VoiceOver’s ‘read-all’ mode, it still fails to parse properly, garbling the entire list as one sentence.

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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 clear when or if it will make it into the mainstream browser.

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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, without having to keep track of every data point like they would in a table. I’m not a screen reader user myself, so don’t know how useful this is, but it is certainly an interesting experiment. To try, turn on your screen reader and navigate to the visually hidden “Listen to audio representation of daily cases for Scotland” button.

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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 😉).

Prefer longer newsletters? You can subscribe to week11y, fortnight11y or even month11y updates! Every newsletter gets the same content; it is your choice to have short, regular emails or longer, less frequent ones. Curated with ♥ by developer @ChrisBAshton.