How to Create an Accessible Progress Bar With React I always find it interesting to read tutorials on how to write a commonly needed component, in an accessible way. This tutorial doesn’t do a great job of explaining the purpose of each line of code, but it’s fairly straightforward to follow. The progress bar <div>… [Read More]

Do we need an Interop for assistive technologies? Hidde de Vries writes about Interop 2022: a collaborative initiative shared by the major browser vendors to solve the 15 top browser compatibility issues. These include areas like cascade layers, CSS color spaces, scrolling behaviour, and so on. Hidde would like to see an equivalent of this but… [Read More]

EA shares more accessibility patents Electronic Arts – the games developer – unveiled its “accessibility patent pledge” in August 2021. Its purpose is to “create a collective” among games developers, to improve accessibility for disabled players. It originally shared 5 patents through the pledge: In late 2022 they added 6 more: Finally, EA has open-sourced Fonttik,… [Read More]

colorandcontrast.com This is a very deep dive into colour, contrast, and how people differ in how they see things. It has interactive examples throughout, which really help to illustrate the concepts. Definitely one worth a bookmark. It begins with the biology of the eye, before going into colour vision and visual impairments, and different vision… [Read More]

Swearing and automatic captions Eric Bailey highlights the issue of how automatic captions deal with swearing. A number of providers automatically censor certain words, displaying a string of asterisks instead. There are lots of problems with this: Eric experiments with speaking specific swear words into a number of different applications that provide automatic captioning, e.g…. [Read More]

The 411 on 4.1.1 Adrian Roselli writes about WCAG SC 4.1.1: a 13.5 years old rule that first came out in WCAG 2.0. Roughly, it stipulates that content should have proper markup (elements only nested as per specifications, no duplicate attributes or IDs, etc). One of the authors recently-ish filed a proposal to clarify the… [Read More]

Giphy is adding alt text to make GIFs more accessible Giphy is working with Scribely (a “content accessibility solutions provider”) to add descriptive text to its most popular animated gifs. It will be professionally hand written, not auto-generated. Giphy is also planning to expose the alt text through its APIs, so that third party platforms… [Read More]

We’re fast approaching Christmas, and I have a gift for you. You can shape the future direction of this newsletter by filling in my survey! It would really help me to understand what you like or don’t like, which subjects you’d like to read more about, all that lovely stuff. All I Want for Christmas… [Read More]

A Guide To Keyboard Accessibility: HTML And CSS (Part 1) This is a comprehensive run-through of a lot of the stuff you may already know: how different tabindex values affect keyboard behaviour, the new(ish) :focus-within CSS selector to be able to apply focus styles on a container element, the new (and not ready to use… [Read More]

HTMHell Advent Calendar 2022 Manuel Matuzović’s famous “HTMHell” site cites lots of examples of bad HTML practices, copied from real websites. See “button disguised as a link“. Last year, Manuel created an ‘advent calendar’ of links to other sites, linking to articles about HTML. This year, Manuel has enlisted the help of 24 authors from… [Read More]