A plan for accessible maps Benjy Stanton describes how he would design a map service from the ground up, considering the needs of all users. Maps are inherently inaccessible – they require digital and geographic literacy as well as visual methods of communication, so they should always be seen as an enhancement. Benjy’s tips can… [Read More]

What would an ethical overlay look like? Karl Groves writes about the ‘overlay widgets’ offered by companies such as accessiBe, and how their claim that including their product on your website will make it fully WCAG compliant is simply untrue. Many a11y issues, such as missing alt text, can only be fixed by a person…. [Read More]

Use feature flags to make your website more accessible Interesting idea from Heidi Waterhouse: allow users of your app to set their preferences for things like font size, contrast, and font family, and persist these preferences in a database [or cookie]. Then, when rendering the page for the returning user, retrieve their preferences and give… [Read More]

frequent11y is now 1 year old! 🎉 Since the first issue of dai11y on 28th October 2019, I’ve published well over 200 posts covering design, technology, science and ethics in the world of accessibility. I’ve been really enjoying reading so many articles and sharing them with you, and I’ve really appreciated the nice comments and… [Read More]

How studying fruit flies might help us prevent age-related hearing loss in humans Fruit flies are prone to age-related hearing loss – just like humans, whose molecular pathways of hearing are very similar – maintaining their sensitive hearing for about 85% of their 58 day lives. The article goes into more scientific detail than I’m… [Read More]

Your fortnightly frequent11y newsletter, brought to you by @ChrisBAshton (due to an oversight, I’m publishing this a week late – apologies!): How do the new iOS 14 accessibility features stack up? Deque reviews the new a11y features in iOS 14. It supports widgets on the home screen, e.g. for at-a-glance weather reports, which makes it… [Read More]

6 webinars from GDS to improve accessibility within your organisation A curated list of videos from the Global Accessibility Awareness Day (21 May 2020): Introduction to the Public Sector Bodies accessibility regulations (34m), How to make your PDFs accessible (17m), How to engage your workforce on accessibility (16m), How to avoid common accessibility statement fails… [Read More]

How to Create Accessible Cooking Videos Article describing what to do as a content creator to make your videos accessible. It pertains to cooking, but could equally be applied to most videos. 1: provide captions, either via sidecar caption file or embedding directly into video. 2: describe visual elements via a separate audio description track,… [Read More]

Equal Entry Website Called Out as Inaccessible A bit of a clickbaity headline, describing how Equal Entry responded to a complaint that one of their web pages had 2 accessibility errors, which was the result of an automated tool and turned out to be all false positives. For example, one of the errors was that… [Read More]

How Alexa has change the life of a disabled person Colin Hughes describes how his muscular dystrophy can make it difficult to use remote controls. He now uses Alexa to control thermostats, lights and blinds with his voice. Taking inspiration from a video showing how a garage door can be opened/closed with a cheap wireless… [Read More]