How Animal Crossing: New Horizons Players Use The Game’s Customization To Make It More Accessible Blind athlete Ross Minor navigates the Animal Crossing world by hearing; the sound of your character’s footsteps stops if you walk into an obstacle, and you can use noisy waterfalls and tiki torches to signpost areas of your village. Shannon… [Read More]

44×44 Pixel Cursor Bookmarklet This tool by Jared Smith is well worth bookmarking. Click it to turn your cursor into a 44×44 pixel square, to make it easier to test your site against WCAG’s Target Size and Pointer Target Spacing rules.

These volunteers are making Black Lives Matter videos accessible to deaf activists A group of volunteers on Twitter noticed that many Black Lives Matter videos were missing captions, so they set up @ProtestAccess. Users can tag this account to ask for transcriptions of a video, which over 250 people are on hand to transcribe. Since… [Read More]

How to Create Accessible Cooking Videos Article describing what to do as a content creator to make your videos accessible. It pertains to cooking, but could equally be applied to most videos. 1: provide captions, either via sidecar caption file or embedding directly into video. 2: describe visual elements via a separate audio description track,… [Read More]

Is Twitter Trolling Us? Why Voice Tweets Are Already Problematic A few weeks ago, Twitter introduced a new feature to a limited group of test users: the ability to tweet audio memos instead of text. It quickly received a backlash from the deaf community, who complained that these tweets have no caption support. The feature… [Read More]

a11y is web accessibility Eric Bailey provides a comprehensive summary of why the term ‘a11y’ is useful, to address the common ironic adage “the term ‘a11y’ is itself inaccessible”. It is easier to type and to say, it allows more room for content inside tweets, and, crucially, it is more specific than ‘accessibility’ as it… [Read More]

Amazon Expands Accessibility Features With New Text Banner for Fire TV Amazon has launched ‘Text Banner’, aimed at assisting users who struggle to read the onscreen text. This text banner appears in a fixed location on the screen and works across the Fire TV UI, but also Prime Video and other applications on your Amazon… [Read More]

New TfL app to help Londoners travel safely round capital The TfL Go app for iPhone (with an Android version landing this autumn) shows real-time train times for the London Underground, with information aimed to enable travel at quieter times to help customers maintain social distancing. It includes ‘step-free mode’ which shows all the stations… [Read More]

What’s New in WCAG 2.2 Another excellent Adrian Roselli round-up, detailing the latest WCAG v2 proposal (deadline for comments by 18th September). There are 4 new Level A success criteria: 2.4.13 Fixed Reference Points, 3.2.6 Findable Help, 3.3.7 Accessible Authentication, 3.3.8 Redundant Entry, and existing criterion 2.4.7 Focus Visible has been ‘promoted’ from level AA… [Read More]

Why Deaf People Oppose Using Gene Editing to “Cure” Deafness Article suggesting that people who are deaf view themselves through the social model, rather than medical model, where societal barriers are the source of disability. It argues that an inaccessible society causes more harm than being deaf itself, and that there can be biological advantages… [Read More]