What Does X% of Issues Mean? Adrian Roselli ponders what tools mean when they claim to find up to X% of issues. What do “issues” mean in this context? He ran a Twitter poll with a few options; most people interpreted “issues” to mean ‘issues validating against the 78 Success Criteria from WCAG 2.1’. But… [Read More]

aria-label is a code smell Eric Bailey highlights a snippet from the WebAIM Million report: Increased ARIA usage on pages correlated to higher detected errors. The more ARIA attributes that were present, the more detected accessibility errors could be expected. He references the increased complexity of ‘support’ in the context of ARIA, which is determined… [Read More]

For Blind Internet Users, the Fix Can Be Worse Than the Flaws A (paywalled) New York Times article, offering a rare mainstream insight into the use of overlays that claim to fix accessibility problems and defend companies from litigation. It tells the story of Patrick Perdue, who had been happily using a radio equipment shop… [Read More]

Are Captions More Accessible on the Top of the Screen? An interesting article about the placement of closed captions, which so often is put at the bottom of the screen by default. The author describes how they were seated in an auditorium, which tall people sat in front of them, making it difficult to read… [Read More]

‘Accessibility at the Edge’ W3C CG Is an Overlay Smoke Screen Adrian Roselli brings attention to the Accessibility at the Edge community group, hosted on W3.org. People would be forgiven for assuming that such groups are supported by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), but Adrian talks us through the process, which requires just five… [Read More]

Perceived affordances and the functionality mismatch Léonie Watson shares a design problem she encountered on Twitter. When you have ‘buttons’ grouped together in a row, and only one can be ‘active’ at any one time, how should it be marked up? This fits quite nicely with a standard radio button form control, where you can… [Read More]

Are you sure that’s a number input? Kilian Valkhof highlights how <input type=”number”> is often used incorrectly, despite it being available in browsers for around 8 years now. Number inputs display a ‘spinbox’ (up and down buttons) to make it easier to increment or decrement the input. This kind of indicates the type of thing… [Read More]

A First Look at the Websites and Software Applications Accessibility Act Bill The “Websites and Software Applications Accessibility Act” (or #A11yAct) has been put forward to the United States Congress. If it succeeds, it will build on the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). Its aim is to lead to clearer regulations for digital accessibility requirements… [Read More]

Two new bots can help newsrooms prioritize accessibility and alt text An interview with Patrick Garvin, former worker of Boston Globe. Patrick noticed that a lot of newsrooms tended to omit alt text on their social media, excluding a lot of people from reading that content. So he built an @AltAwareness Twitter bot, which listens… [Read More]

accessguide.io A handy resource for learning about accessibility guidelines for the web. It covers common design patterns such as saving data after session timeout. It covers how to prevent interesting buggy edge cases such as accidentally hitting a button when trying to scroll past it. And it covers common accessibility problems such as identifying and… [Read More]