GOV.UK fixes a noisy screenreader issue GOV.UK had discovered that in recent versions of screen readers, its contact form was too aggressive in announcing how many characters were remaining. This was despite the existing markup of aria-live=”polite”. I’ve been keeping an eye on the GitHub issue for this, and a fix was merged recently. There… [Read More]

Giving a damn about accessibility A useful resource for advocates, created by accessibility professional Sheri Byrne-Haber in partnership with UX Collective. The handbook (PDF – 13.3 MB) is beautifully illustrated throughout its 49 pages, and covers the different ‘people challenges’ you will face as an accessibility advocate, and how to overcome them: People who are… [Read More]

Five 2022 accessibility trends A UX Collective article outlining predicted trends for 2022: The web will become more accessible – particularly the websites of larger companies. The SOAR report found that 62% of the Alexa 100 websites were accessible to screen readers, up from 40% in 2020. The WebAIM Million project found a very slight… [Read More]

Happy New Year! 🎉 New year, new look: you may have noticed the format for this month’s issue is different. I’ve separated each article by heading, and mostly done away with the bulletpoint list format. The old format never felt quite right, and made things like code examples difficult to add, but it did help… [Read More]

Issue 25 of month11y is a special one: it marks two years since the first issue in December 2019. If you count all the dai11y, week11y, fortnight11y and month11y newsletters together, I’ve now published over 600 newsletters! I didn’t honestly know if I’d be able to keep it up, especially after stepping down from frontend… [Read More]

Surface Adaptive Kit makes Microsoft’s laptops more accessible Microsoft is creating a “Surface Adaptive Kit” for its range of laptops/tablets, to better accommodate people with disabilities. The kit includes “keycap labels, bump labels, port indicators and device openers”. For example, a device opener includes a pull tab and ring, to make it easier to open… [Read More]

We start off with a Twitter special! I’ve already recently written about how Twitter’s new design has been giving users headaches. But there have been a flurry of other articles about Twitter, so I thought I’d round them up for you. What’s Really Wrong With the New Twitter Font An interview with Frederick Brennan, who… [Read More]

A Deep Dive on Skipping to Content Paul Ratcliffe describes a “2021-friendly” implementation of a skip link. It looks something like this (note that the text is hidden visually until it is focused – I’ve omitted this from the code below): <a href=”#skip-link-target”>Skip to main content</a> <a href=”#skip-link-target” id=”skip-link-target”>Start of main content</a><main>the content</main> Paul points… [Read More]

What Happens When a Blind Person Test Drives VoiceOver Recognition? An article by Rhea Althea Guntalilib, describing her experience of using the new “VoiceOver Recognition” features of iOS 14. It is a collection of tools including “Screen Recognition” (which I’ll talk about below), “Text Recognition” (which detects text found in images) and “Image Descriptions” (which… [Read More]

How anyone can make Maps more accessible Google relies on its community of Local Guides to update Google Maps information by, for example, inputting whether a restaurant has tables suitable for people who use wheelchairs. These guides share some actionable tips for crowd-sourcing information to benefit everyone, particularly people with disabilities: An accessibility checklist can… [Read More]