Category: dai11y

Rail stations across Great Britain receive £20 million funding boost for accessibility improvements

• 124 stations in Great Britain will gain new lifts, accessible toilets and/or improved customer information screens. A list of affected stations appears at the bottom of the page.

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Screen readers and cookie consents

• In this video from the London Web Performance Group this month, Léonie Watson demonstrates that by using headings to navigate with a screen reader, she never encounters the GDPR cookie notice on a lot of websites. And if she does, it’s often difficult to figure out what she’s consenting to. A good example of an accessible cookie notice is on the Atlassian website.

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Building an accessible autocomplete control

• Adam Silver explains in detail how to build an accessible autocomplete component, taking into account the noJS experience, announcing results to screen readers, hiding suggestions ‘on blur’, keyboard support and endonym/typo support. It’s always surprising just how complicated autocompletes can be, and this is a really good example of one done right.

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Celebrate Global Accessibility Awareness Day with GDS

• GDS is running a conference this Thursday 21st May, with registration closing at 5pm on the 20th. Agenda: 9:30am “An introduction to digital accessibility regulations”, 11am “How to avoid common accessibility statement fails”, 12:30pm “How to carry out basic accessibility checks”, 3pm “Making accessibility accessible: the secret to engaging your workforce”, 4pm “What would Marie Kondo do? How to clear your website of inaccessible PDFs”.

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Proper VoiceOver support coming soon to Firefox on MacOS

• Mozilla announces that by the end of June, Firefox should have basic support for MacOS VoiceOver. By the end of the year, the experience should be improved for visually impaired VoiceOver users, including live region support and rotor item support. The post goes into detail about what was achieved in each Firefox version from v75 onwards.

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WCAG 2.1 and PDF Accessibility

• Lots of useful reminders. Something that conforms to WCAG 2.1 AA will also conform to WCAG 2.0 AA. Line height should be at least 1.5 times font size; spacing following paragraphs should be at least 2 times; letter spacing at least 0.12 times; word spacing at least 0.16 times. JavaScript inside PDF forms that sets a timer must warn what data will be lost if not completed in time, and/or should allow time extensions.
• EDIT 21/05/2020: I had misread the article – WCAG does not stipulate that line height should be 1.5 times the font size (nor any of the other rules quoted). Instead it says that if a user sets their own custom style override such that line height is 1.5 times the font size, there should be no loss to content or functionality. Apologies for the confusion – I have now struck out the offending lines above. Thanks to Anika Henke for pointing this out.

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Supporting users who change colours on GOV.UK

• A post from 2018 that resurfaced recently and still has lots of great tips. GOV.UK uses the CSS triangle method to create a back link component whose triangle arrow icon renders even when the user has overridden their colours. The site logo was once a PNG, but under these conditions would disappear, so was replaced with inline SVG. Focus states and panels that ought to stand out would also get lost when colours are overridden, so a transparent border was added.

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AI Is Not Similar To Human Intelligence. Thinking So Could Be Dangerous

• Dr Elizabeth Fernandez gives three reasons why AI is not the same as human thought. 1) they’re easy to fool: a neural network might correctly classify an image as a banana, but introduce a slight amount of noise and it might re-classify it as a toaster. 2) they need an enormous amount of data to learn: thousands of pictures, versus just a few for a toddler. 3) they’re “myopic”: powerful enough to correctly identify Kim Kardashian, yet seeing nothing wrong if her eye and lips swap places. I found this article via Marco Zehe’s blog, who references it to suggest that AI will never be able to write reliable alt text.

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The Complete Guide to Accessibility for WordPress Websites

• Post on deque.com highlighting that WordPress powers 35% of websites and its accessibility greatly depends on the themes and plugins you have installed. There are a number of themes explicitly tagged as “Accessibility Ready”, although you should manually test too as quality varies. The new WordPress editor ‘Gutenberg’ was released in mid 2019 despite its accessibility issues, but the maintainers hope these are all resolved in 2020.

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When (not) to use the <br> element

• Šime Vidas shares a helpful reminder that the <br> line break element is useful in some cases. Whilst web developers have generally moved away from <br> use – seeing line breaks as presentation, not content, and therefore using CSS instead – it should still be used when line breaks are part of the content. For example: poems or addresses.

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