Everyone Watches TV with Subtitles Now. How’d That Happen? I thought this article was interesting to call out, as in my experience we still often assume captions should be an ‘opt in’ thing. But perhaps things have pivoted to them being ‘opt out’. Indeed, some captions are now ‘on’ by default on social media. In… [Read More]

A Practical Approach to Automated Accessibility Mark Steadman writes a mini series on automated accessibility. In this introductory article, Mark introduces his three-step plan for introducing automated accessibility checks into your pipeline: There are a lot of different testing approaches and tools out there, so having a three phase plan for testing is a useful… [Read More]

It’s been a little while since my last month11y, partly because Mailchimp have recently upped their prices, meaning I’m no longer within the free tier. I’ve been procrastinating moving to a different provider, but will give that some more thought. I’ll also be on annual leave for a while now, so you won’t hear much… [Read More]

We begin with a Smashing Magazine special! It’s a great publication – which I’ve written for a few times – and I’ve had some of their a11y articles sitting in my bookmarks for a while. These articles are long and full of useful info, so it’s sure to be a bumper week. Let’s dive in!… [Read More]

Welcome to the first month11y of 2023! I’ve had a nice little break from the newsletter, but am looking forward to getting going again. But first: a big thank you to everyone who completed my survey. It’s really useful knowing what’s most important to you (so much so that I’ll leave it open, in case… [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]

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]

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 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! Designing for Web Accessibility in 60 Seconds UX Designer David Kennedy writes a short article with some useful quick wins for accessibility, focussed around asking questions. Is the content… [Read More]