AudioEye Sues AccessiBe for Patent Infringement AudioEye is suing accessiBe for allegedly using tech that AudioEye has a U.S. patent on (patent no. 10,762,280). Both companies are involved with accessibility. accessiBe announced 12 million dollars of funding in May 2020. The article laments the fact that one a11y-focussed company is suing another, and wishes the… [Read More]

Five Things I Use My Phone For On A Daily Basis Luke Sam Sowden, who is “Severely Partially Sighted”, describes how he uses the accessibility features of his iPhone XR, and apps. He uses Microsoft Seeing AI, Tap Tap See and Digit-Eyes to use his phone’s camera to recognise objects, people and text in his… [Read More]

What to look for in an accessibility audit A blog post by Glenda Sims, describing Deque’s different audit offerings. Clients need to choose the browsers and assistive technologies included in the audit, though this needs to be balanced against the cost of testing. Pragmatically, Glenda claims that using Chrome with NVDA will catch >90% of… [Read More]

Typing With One Hand on Your iPhone Just Got a Little Easier As iPhones get bigger, it can be harder to reach certain keys on your keyboard when using just one hand. Apple have built a “One-Handed Keyboard” mode, which squashes the keys together and makes it easier to reach any given key with your… [Read More]

6 webinars from GDS to improve accessibility within your organisation A curated list of videos from the Global Accessibility Awareness Day (21 May 2020): Introduction to the Public Sector Bodies accessibility regulations (34m), How to make your PDFs accessible (17m), How to engage your workforce on accessibility (16m), How to avoid common accessibility statement fails… [Read More]

Decoding Label and Name for Accessibility Consider the following HTML: <label>Name: <input aria-label=”First name” placeholder=”e.g. Chris” title=”Enter a name”></label>. What gets read out by screen readers? Answer: the aria-label always takes priority. In its absence, it would be the label, and in the absence of that, the title, or if nothing else, the placeholder. These… [Read More]

upyoura11y.com Suzanne Aitchison created this site to help share the a11y knowledge she has curated over the years as a software developer. It covers fundamentals, but also there’s a specific section covering a11y in Single Page Applications, which can otherwise be quite hard to find resources for. Well worth a look.

When there is no content between headings This is a question that often comes up: are you allowed to have a heading immediately followed by another heading, with no content in between? Hidde de Vries gives us a useful rule: “Always have content between headings of the same level.” I.e. a <h2> immediately followed by… [Read More]

Operating System and Browser Accessibility Display Modes Eric Bailey summarises several global settings users might use to change their display, the reason for their existence and the effect they can have on your website. The modes are Dark, Increased Contrast, Inverted Colors, Reduced Motion, and High Contrast. He also describes how to target them in… [Read More]

Autonomous vehicles should benefit those with disabilities, but progress remains slow An MIT report estimates that autonomous vehicles might not hit the streets for another decade. The benefits when they arrive, however, will be massive for the disabled community. In the USA alone, it would enable employment for 2 million people with disabilities, while saving… [Read More]