Category: dai11y

Your daily frequent11y newsletter, brought to you by @ChrisBAshton:

How Glasgow’s clubs try to be accessible for everyone

• Not necessarily what you’re expecting to read from the title (it’s not all “installing a lift for wheelchair users”, writes Kamila Rymajdo). Kamila highlights the efforts a number of clubs are making to become more inclusive spaces for the LGBTQ community, such as briefing clubbers at the door about what the night celebrates (including financial assistance for travel and reduced entry fees for some), and a representative present throughout the night for people to talk to if they are encounter any problems. Others are taking steps to not dim lights to an uncomfortable degree, to have visuals that are suitable for epileptic individuals, and to always have somewhere to sit and water visibly available.

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.

Your daily frequent11y newsletter, brought to you by @ChrisBAshton:

aria-label Does Not Translate

• Interesting post by Adrian Roselli, highlighting that for users who rely on built-in translation services in their browser, aria-label markup often isn’t translated. For this reason he recommends tweaking your design to use native HTML (label, etc), or otherwise using visually hidden text or aria-labelledby which do not have the same issues with auto-translating. He also highlights a new aria-description property that is coming to ARIA, which solves the messiness of aria-labelledby requiring additional nodes in the DOM that could be accidentally read out twice. However, it will have the same translation issue as aria-label until auto-translators get better.

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.

Your daily frequent11y newsletter, brought to you by @ChrisBAshton:

Why GOV.UK content should be published in HTML and not PDF

• A GOV.UK article from 2018 that is still relevant today. It highlights the problems with PDFs (not designed for screens – particularly on mobile, hard to track and to update, and often inaccessible to assistive technology) whilst acknowledging their advantages (control over design, easy to create from many applications, predictable printing behaviour). The comments are worth reading too: some argue that static PDFs are better than dynamic HTML for archival reasons, as well as easier offline access that doesn’t require “Print to PDF” technical knowledge. These are areas GOV.UK could do better at while still advocating for a HTML-first approach.

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.

Your daily frequent11y newsletter, brought to you by @ChrisBAshton:

Progressive React

• A surprisingly quick read despite its length: Houssein Djirdeh details several techniques for improving performance and accessibility of React applications. Use pre-rendered or server-side rendered (SSR) React, ideally hydrated in Node ‘streams’ rather than en-masse. Use streams for extracting critical CSS too. Various DevTools profilers help identify unnecessary component re-renders: override shouldComponentUpdate or inherit from PureComponent to mitigate. Split components with React.lazy (or with a library like loadable-components if SSR’d). A worthy read if you ever dabble with React.

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.

Your daily frequent11y newsletter, brought to you by @ChrisBAshton:

Deaf man sues Pornhub over lack of closed captions

• Yaroslav Suris, from New York, is suing Pornhub, RedTube and YouPorn for allegedly violating the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) by not providing closed captions on its videos, on either its free or premium access. Pornhub responds that it has had closed captioning on some of its videos since 2018, and offers a closed caption ‘category’, however concedes that it is not available for the majority of its content.

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.

Your daily frequent11y newsletter, brought to you by @ChrisBAshton:

Facts & Figures: Disabilities in developing countries

• An estimated 1 billion people in the world (15% of the population) live with a disability. 80% of these are in developing countries. 3 percent experience ‘severe disability’ and cannot manage daily life without assistance. Defining & measuring disability is difficult worldwide, with mental health conditions particularly under-reported. Under-reporting is driven by stigma; for example, just 2.2% of Indian residents claim to have a disability whereas the World Health Survey estimates it to be 25%. Disability figures are rising worldwide as a result of aging populations and an increase in chronic health conditions.

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.

Your daily frequent11y newsletter, brought to you by @ChrisBAshton:

How to Create Printer-friendly Pages with CSS

• Article by Craig Buckler, packed with tips on how to improve your website’s print styles; something often overlooked even by a11y-aware devs. I guarantee you’ll learn something new: there are various techniques for avoiding wasting ink. You can automatically add supplementary content such as URLs after links using pure CSS, or print-only content such as copyright messages. You can define page breaks using break-before, break-after or break-inside. You can limit the number of lines of text that carry over to the next page with widows and orphans properties, and control how an element’s border renders when it’s split across multiple pages (box-decoration-break) . Finally, @page selectors and targets allow you to adjust margins on a per-page basis.

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.

Your daily frequent11y newsletter, brought to you by @ChrisBAshton:

How I’m making Maps better for wheelchair users like me

• Article by Google employee Sasha Blair-Goldensohn, talking about the role he’s played in making the world more accessible to the 65 million wheelchair users worldwide. In his “20% time”, Sasha and other colleagues launched ‘wheelchair-friendly transit directions’ for Google Maps, and worked with the 120 million-strong Local Guides community to crowdsource answers about the accessibility of venues. This initial work has led to a full time team dedicated to accessibility on Maps. He also talks about the curb-cut effect, or ‘universal design’, whereby wheelchair-accessible exits from pavements benefit others such as parents pushing strollers, or tourists pulling suitcases.

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.

Your daily frequent11y newsletter, brought to you by @ChrisBAshton:

What’s more expensive than getting sued over inaccessibility?

• The answer: “getting sued twice”. This US-focused article by Sheri Byrne-Haber follows a report showing that 21-40% of accessibility lawsuits are against companies which have been previously sued. The author suggests that this is because companies may fix problems but then don’t build accessibility testing into their ongoing process, so problems inevitably creep back in. It’s also down to the “Hooters effect”; a decision in Haynes vs Hooters shows that other individuals can sue your organisation even while the first lawsuit is being investigated or the fixes are in the process of being implemented.

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.

Your daily frequent11y newsletter, brought to you by @ChrisBAshton:

Training people to do accessibility reviews

• GOV.UK blog post by Beverly Newing, describing how she led accessibility testing training at the Ministry of Justice. She created a fake government service and made it deliberately inaccessible, with an accompanying worksheet and answers that can be covered in a one hour session. Interestingly, Beverly has added some impeding issues that wouldn’t be considered WCAG failures, to hit home that WCAG compliance does not guarantee an accessible service.

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.