Sound thinking: BBC helps audience to hear the details Article about how the BBC used ‘object-based media’ when recording Casualty (Series 34, Episode 36), which features a character with a hearing impairment. Object-based media samples sounds from different parts of the scene – the main dialogue, a heart rate monitor, background noise – and allows… [Read More]

Gutenberg Accessibility Costs WordPress the W3C Work This is a story that has taken up a lot of headlines, and many articles assume a fair bit of background knowledge, so I’ll be giving a longer TLDR than normal (though still largely based on Adrian Roselli‘s article above): The World Wide Web Consortium (WC3) are redesigning… [Read More]

As diabetes increases in sub-Saharan Africa, so will blindness A large number of people arriving at a health organisation in Tanzania have developed diabetic retinopathy – a complication of diabetes that can cause permanent blindness and is the leading cause of blindness in working age adults globally. Many patients are unaware they’re diabetic and are… [Read More]

WAVE 3.1 Release Version 3.1 of the accessibility evaluation tools has been released, with improvements including: YouTube videos are identified as an Alert (prompts users to verify it has captions), better ARIA and title support, reduced false errors for contrast testing, and identifying structures that could be lists (but are not marked up as such).

How do the new iOS 14 accessibility features stack up? Deque reviews the new a11y features in iOS 14. It supports widgets on the home screen, e.g. for at-a-glance weather reports, which makes it easier for everybody to find out pertinent information quickly. Back Tap (tapping 2-3 times on the back of the phone) can… [Read More]

Are clear masks the way to clearer communication? The deaf community isn’t so sure. Yahoo! article by Abby Haglage, explaining that clear face masks may not be the panacea we think it is for the deaf community. The masks can fog up, reducing visibility – and even if that is put aside, lip reading is… [Read More]

10 Things to Know About Twitter’s Alternative Text for Images Article by Deborah Edwards-Oñoro, summarising a few things you may not know about alt text for images in tweets. Alt text is now enabled by default on the web and apps (no need to turn on image descriptions in settings). Alt text cannot be added… [Read More]

Duet Date Picker This is a WCAG 2.1 compliant date picker, from the Duet Design System, that also allows you set a minimum and maximum allowed date. It can be used standalone or incorporated into any JavaScript framework, and weighs 10kb minified and Gzip’ed. It supports modern browsers and screen readers, and has limited support… [Read More]

alt attributes like paragraphs Developer and accessibility expert Dave Rupert came to a realisation recently: “alt text is like a paragraph”. To clarify, Dave isn’t talking about the length of the alt text here, but the order in which it appears, and its contextual relevance. A lot of designs have images appearing before headings, but… [Read More]

GDS updates its Government Service Standard requirements for assistive technology (AT) testing Other than updating version numbers of AT and browser combinations, the main changes are: adding TalkBack (Android screen reader); reducing magnification level to test in from 10x to 4x; swapping ZoomText with Windows Magnifier or Apple Zoom; and specifying VoiceOver should be tested… [Read More]