Material Design Text Fields Are Badly Designed Smashing Magazine article by Adam Silver, describing what’s wrong with the text fields in Material Design (Google’s design system). Material Design uses “float labels”: text that appears in the input, like a placeholder, but moves above the input when you focus on the element. This is better than… [Read More]
The no-mouse challenge:Â Taking the keyboard navigation red pill^ Denis Boudreau describes “the no-mouse challenge”: start a timer, open a website and see how long it takes you to run into a brick wall. Participants in his workshops are “blown away” at the brittle nature of the web once you go off the beaten track of… [Read More]
How we created a reporting tool to improve the accessibility of GOV.UK Avision Ho, a data scientist at GDS, describes how their team built a tool to check half a million GOV.UK pages for some specific WCAG failures. They concentrated on 8 problems, including non-semantic headers (paragraph text styled with bold, mimicking the style of… [Read More]
Android update adds scheduled texts and improves accessibility Whilst Android 12 will likely be released in September 2021, a first developer preview is out now. One accessibility improvement is that you will be able to make calls, set timers and play music from the lock screen, using Android’s ‘Assistant’. This will benefit those with mobility… [Read More]
We begin with some special WCAG 3.0 coverage, in which I’ve read and summarised a two-parter by deque. Part 1: What to Expect From The First Public Working Draft of WCAG 3.0 WCAG 3.0 is designed to be easier to learn than its predecessors. Instead of ‘success criteria’, we have ‘outcomes’. The former concern the… [Read More]
Form design: multiple inputs versus one input Blog post by Adam Silver, explaining why splitting inputs can be problematic. A technique often used for credit card numbers and bank sort-codes, I’ve often found such forms quite slick, but hadn’t considered some of their accessibility downsides: Multiple inputs mean users can’t easily paste information in, unless… [Read More]
ProPublica experiments with ultra-accessible plain language in stories about people with disabilities News organisation ProPublica ‘translated’ one of their articles into plain language, in an effort to be more accessible to people with intellectual/developmental disabilities. Here’s the original article: People with Developmental Disabilities Were Promised Help. Instead, They Face Delays and Denials. And here’s the… [Read More]
5 Ways You’re Not Making Your Website Accessible A listicle by Twan Mulder, which I wasn’t expecting to learn anything from – but then I learned something from the very first point! It was this: You often need to denote the ‘current’ page in navigation, and you see this in the wild with class=”active” or… [Read More]
How to start testing screen reader support using VoiceOver Article by Yakim van Zuijlen, describing how to use VoiceOver on a Mac to test your website. It’s aimed at beginners, but goes into quite a lot of detail, including how to find items by type (e.g. blockquote). There are some beautiful, clear illustrations throughout the… [Read More]
12 Common Words and Phrases You May Not Realise Are Ableist Some of these seem fairly obvious, but others less so. With respect to autism, “high or low functioning” is an ableist term I hadn’t considered. ‘Differently abled’ and ‘special needs’ are also poor euphemisms for the term ‘disabled’. ‘Tone deaf’ and ‘blind spot’ are… [Read More]
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