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]

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]

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]

Abbreviations can be problematic Martin Underhill writes about the problems of using abbreviations such as NGL (“not gonna lie”) and how inaccessible these cultural shortcuts can be. There is an official ‘fix’ for this in HTML: <abbr title=”Not gonna lie”>NGL</abbr>, but it doesn’t show a tooltip when a touchscreen user touches it, nor is it… [Read More]

Candidate recommendation version of WCAG 2.2 published September 6th 2022 marks the first update since May 2021. According to w3.org: A Candidate Recommendation is a document that satisfies the technical requirements of the Working Group that produced it and their dependencies, and has already received wide review. W3C publishes a Candidate Recommendation to signal to… [Read More]

My War On Animation Article on The Verge, as part of July’s Accessibility Week. The author writes about their experiences navigating the web as someone who finds any animation a stimulatory overload. They acknowledge that there are documented standards for the ‘limits’ of animation on the web, such as keeping gifs to five seconds maximum…. [Read More]

The Hidden History of Screen Readers This lengthy but approachable article by The Verge covers the history of JAWS and NVDA. Ted Henter lost his sight in a car accident in 1978. Losing his job as a racing driver and mechanical engineer, he studied computer science, having to get volunteers to read programming books and… [Read More]

The negative impact of stylised captions on TikTok and Instagram It used to be that there was not enough captioned content on social media. People were posting videos but not captioning them, either because it wasn’t possible on the platform at the time or because they couldn’t be bothered. Auto captioning has become more and… [Read More]

I’m back, having got married, been on honeymoon, and perhaps inevitably, caught COVID. So, a little later than planned, please enjoy the latest issue of frequent11y! Robles v. Domino’s Settles After Six Years of Litigation This case concerns Guillermo Robles, a blind customer of Domino’s who was unable to order a custom pizza from their… [Read More]

This issue of fortnight11y is slightly delayed – work has been busy! This issue begins with my usual roundup of some recent/topical a11y articles, but finishes with a ‘hardware special’, covering some interesting developments in the world of physical technology. This will also be my only newsletter in June. This week, I’m getting married, and… [Read More]