How studying fruit flies might help us prevent age-related hearing loss in humans Fruit flies are prone to age-related hearing loss – just like humans, whose molecular pathways of hearing are very similar – maintaining their sensitive hearing for about 85% of their 58 day lives. The article goes into more scientific detail than I’m… [Read More]

a11yresources A curated list of a11y resources by Hannah Milan. Browse browser extensions, bookmarklets, checklists, colour picker tools, articles, and even other accessibility focused newsletters (I won’t be offended 😉). Tech volunteers develop new online tool to help visually impaired access COVID-19 data The ‘Scottish Tech Army’ have created a dashboard of COVID-19 statistics in… [Read More]

How do the new iOS 14 accessibility features stack up? Deque reviews the new a11y features in iOS 14. It supports widgets on the home screen, e.g. for at-a-glance weather reports, which makes it easier for everybody to find out pertinent information quickly. Back Tap (tapping 2-3 times on the back of the phone) can… [Read More]

GDS updates its Government Service Standard requirements for assistive technology (AT) testing Other than updating version numbers of AT and browser combinations, the main changes are: adding TalkBack (Android screen reader); reducing magnification level to test in from 10x to 4x; swapping ZoomText with Windows Magnifier or Apple Zoom; and specifying VoiceOver should be tested… [Read More]

6 webinars from GDS to improve accessibility within your organisation A curated list of videos from the Global Accessibility Awareness Day (21 May 2020): Introduction to the Public Sector Bodies accessibility regulations (34m), How to make your PDFs accessible (17m), How to engage your workforce on accessibility (16m), How to avoid common accessibility statement fails… [Read More]

Operating System and Browser Accessibility Display Modes Eric Bailey summarises several global settings users might use to change their display, the reason for their existence and the effect they can have on your website. The modes are Dark, Increased Contrast, Inverted Colors, Reduced Motion, and High Contrast. He also describes how to target them in… [Read More]

How to Create Accessible Cooking Videos Article describing what to do as a content creator to make your videos accessible. It pertains to cooking, but could equally be applied to most videos. 1: provide captions, either via sidecar caption file or embedding directly into video. 2: describe visual elements via a separate audio description track,… [Read More]

New TfL app to help Londoners travel safely round capital The TfL Go app for iPhone (with an Android version landing this autumn) shows real-time train times for the London Underground, with information aimed to enable travel at quieter times to help customers maintain social distancing. It includes ‘step-free mode’ which shows all the stations… [Read More]

Here’s your delayed weekly a11y roundup. It’s a short one this week, as I’ve been on holiday for the last 10 days. Normal service shall be resumed next week! Equal Entry Website Called Out as Inaccessible A bit of a clickbaity headline, describing how Equal Entry responded to a complaint that one of their web… [Read More]

Making Facebook.com accessible to as many people as possible A Facebook Engineering article describing how the site redesign in React provided opportunities to improve accessibility. Using React Context, heading levels automatically increase as they are nested (i.e. <Heading /><section><Heading /></section> automatically creates a h1 followed by a h2). They use the same mechanism for contextual… [Read More]