Hyperlegible: an approach to accessible type design (video, 10 minutes) Linus Boman, who I was lucky enough to have as a housemate a few years ago, is a design expert. Here, he talks about the new Atkinson Hyperlegible Font – which he helped to develop – and which is now freely available on Google Fonts… [Read More]

Accessibility of the section element Scott O’Hara writes about the <section> element, designed for representing a group of content that has an “overarching theme”. Headings within each <section> are meant to be scoped semantically within that section (you could in theory put <h1> tags inside each <section>), but in practice, nothing different gets programmatically exposed… [Read More]

Do not assume users turn off CSS or JavaScript I’ve seen this before, but Stefan Judis’ newsletter pointed it out to me again. This is the Government Digital Service’s “service manual” on “Building a resilient frontend using progressive enhancement”. It maintains that we don’t support no-JS / no-CSS browsers for the sake of a minority… [Read More]

‘May be an image’: What it’s like browsing Instagram while blind Kait Sanchez writes about the experience of screen reader users on social media. The auto generated alt text for photos on Instagram and other sites is often poor: “two brown cats lying on a textured surface” turned out to be a woman in a… [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 people should know BEFORE writing articles or creating products about accessibility Sheri Byrne-Haber writes about getting disabled users involved in your product development early on. It is possible to build a product that is technically accessible but is inefficient and unusable in practice. “You cannot retrofit lived experience”. Some products don’t support an intersectionality… [Read More]

It is time to ditch the title “Evangelist” from Accessibility Ronise Nepomuceno explains why she hates the term ‘Accessibility Evangelist’: It reinforces the idea that accessibility is a ‘nice to have’ that can be deprioritised It has its roots in tech in the 1980’s, when Apple put together a team to ‘evangelise’ developers to develop… [Read More]

Twitter’s new design to get fix after headache complaints BBC article from 16th August. Highlights: “Twitter is making changes to its new redesign, after users complained of headaches and discomfort.” “Unveiled only last week, the redesign mainly involved high-contrast colours and a custom-designed font, Chirp.” Its aim was to “improve content consumption and clean up… [Read More]

Writing great alt text: Emotion matters Jake Archibald describes how he was trying to decide what alt text to use for his avatar, which would appear alongside his name, in a list of conference speakers. His (and my) instinct was that it should be nullified (alt=””) because it would otherwise be repeating information elsewhere in… [Read More]