Piccadilly Lights turned upside down to raise awareness of challenges faced by blind people For the week of the 6th July, London’s infamous advertising billboard at Piccadilly Circus was turned upside down to raise awareness of the challenges raised by social distancing for the blind and partially sighted. RNIB said “the usual methods of navigating… [Read More]

Killer Instinct: How To: Play The Game Blindfolded (video, or article if you’d prefer) An interesting video by SightlessKombat, a blind gamer describing how they rose to the top tier of players by relying on their hearing. By turning up the volume of the ‘heads up display’, they could listen carefully to the pitch changing… [Read More]

Accessibility Dont’s, Learn From Basic Mistakes in Web Design Adam Laki shares five common a11y fails to avoid. 1: don’t remove underlines on links. 2: don’t remove outlines on focusable elements. 3: don’t remove textarea resize functionality. 4: don’t open links in new browser windows. 5: don’t use fixed font-size. There are caveats to each… [Read More]

Amazing haptic speaker lets visually impaired people read braille in midair Researchers at Bayreuth University, Germany, are working on a speaker system that uses acoustic force and ultrasound to recreate traditional braille writing in midair. The system known as HaptiRead comes at a very poignant time as people are worried about touching surfaces during this… [Read More]

We need more inclusive web performance metrics Scott Jehl writes about how popular user metrics such as Largest Contentful Paint are not necessarily useful to everyone. Users relying on screen readers may not be able to read the page until it becomes fully interactive, sometimes long after the DOM is complete. Scott has raised an… [Read More]

Blindness cure in sight Macular degeneration is a common eye disease affecting 200 million people worldwide. It can lead to complete blindness. Scientists are working on a new treatment utilising gene therapy and near-infrared light. Early tests on human retinas show that ‘near-infrared light exposures reactivate the human retina’s visual circuitry’.

iOS 14 is filled with accessibility improvements iOS 14 introduces sound recognition, which alerts you when it detects the sound of a doorbell, siren, smoke alarm or baby crying. You can now tap the back of your phone to access the notification centre, which those with motor disabilities may find easier than swiping down from… [Read More]

Meaning without markup: Accessibility Object Model Hidde de Vries writes about the Accessibility Object Model proposal for JavaScript, which allows devs to hook into the accessibility tree (like Service Workers are able to hook into the network). It should make code easier to test, and HTML less verbose, since you would operate on the element… [Read More]