In a New Year special, I’m summarising not one, not two, but three articles today. It’s my attempt to clarify what seems quite a contradictory issue: whether you should ‘try on’ a disability to build empathy, and/or build better products and services. As someone who has written a series of articles on using the web… [Read More]
Equal Entry Guidelines for Describing 360-Degree Video An interesting set of guidelines describing the challenges of audio-describing a 360 degree video (which will become more prevalent as VR grows). You should divide the video into scenes, write a brief introductory description for each scene, then write audio descriptions for each direction a viewer could face… [Read More]
VoiceOver Preview for macOS Firefox Mozilla have worked hard over the past year to deliver VoiceOver support for Firefox on macOS – something that had been lacking for 15 years. It’s now ready to try in the Firefox 85 Beta and Mozilla are calling on volunteers to try it out and report any bugs they… [Read More]
Lists A Jeremy Keith entry from his journal. Lists are helpfully announced to screen readers when they are navigated to (e.g. “List: six items”). However, Webkit browsers such as Safari don’t announce lists if the lists’ bullets have been removed using CSS (just like it doesn’t announce content that has been visually hidden with display:… [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]
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]
iPhones can now automatically recognize and label buttons and UI features for blind users iOS 14 has a new feature, “Screen Recognition”, which is built into VoiceOver. It uses AI to detect interactable elements on the screen, even when such elements aren’t properly labelled / exposed to assistive technology. It has the potential to allow… [Read More]
Alexa Makes Shopping Lists Sharable as Accessibility Feature Alexa allows you to create lists such as shopping lists and todo lists, adding and removing items with your voice. And now, users can ask Alexa to send a given list to a specific contact. Once Alexa confirms it has identified the right person, the recipient gets… [Read More]
A placeholder is not a label This is your regular reminder from HTMHell that <input type=”text” placeholder=”First name”> is not accessible and requires an associated <label>. Some screen readers will fall back to using the placeholder if a label is missing, but it can’t be relied upon. There are various UI issues with a placeholder-only… [Read More]
Are your Anchor Links Accessible? Amber Wilson describes the HTML structure she came up with for turning headings into ‘linkable headings’, whose links can be used as anchor links to that specific part of the page. It can be tricky to implement these without making it a noisy or confusing experience for screen reader users…. [Read More]
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