How Alexa has change the life of a disabled person Colin Hughes describes how his muscular dystrophy can make it difficult to use remote controls. He now uses Alexa to control thermostats, lights and blinds with his voice. Taking inspiration from a video showing how a garage door can be opened/closed with a cheap wireless… [Read More]

Disney+ Honored by the American Council of the Blind for Their Audio Description Tracks Audio descriptions are added to films in order to recreate the visual experiences happening onscreen. Disney+ has received an Achievement Award in Audio Description from the American Council of the Blind (ACB) for their commitment to adding audio description tracks to… [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]

A Complete Guide to Links and Buttons An excellent resource by CSS-Tricks. I learned that the download attribute on links instructs the browser to download the resource; that links can have a rel attribute that define the relationship to the target (e.g. rel=”author”); that you can chain link styles (a:focus:hover {}); and that if you… [Read More]

Enhancing ARIA landmarks with aria-labelledby Article by Léonie Watson describing how to use aria-labelledby to distinguish between multiple navigational elements. Example: <nav role=”navigation” aria-labelledby=”firstLabel”><p>Choose an <span id=”firstLabel”>aisle</span> to browse</p><ul><li><a href=”fresh.html”>Fresh foods</a></li>…</ul>. How Does HTML Microdata Help With Accessibility? Scott Vinkle explains how pages marked up with microdata helps the ‘Reader Mode’ in browsers to find… [Read More]

The troubled state of screen readers in multilingual situations Xurxe Toivo García shares their findings when testing different screen reader / browser / OS combinations with a simple English web page featuring a <span> with a different lang to the main page. All were inconsistent and none worked perfectly. On VoiceOver for desktop, paragraph text… [Read More]

Legacy Applications and Accessibility A deque.com blog post describing approaches to finding accessibility issues in legacy code; for example, scanning the codebase for positive tab index values (tabindex=”1″ etc). An interesting idea is an ‘accessibility JavaScript file’ that you can include on pages to help fix a11y issues without having to modify the legacy code…. [Read More]

I Don’t Care What Google or Apple or Whoever Did Adrian Roselli complains that when he raises accessibility/usability issues with clients, their response is “but Google does this”. He then lists several poor UI changes the big companies have made and subsequently U-turned on, such as Google’s form fields without boxes, or Apple’s super thin… [Read More]

After a week on holiday (as best as possible in the lockdown!), I have a bumper issue for you this week! Sa11y – accessibility quality assurance assistant An accessibility quality assurance tool geared towards content authors: Sa11y visually highlights common errors, with contextual information. Try out the demo. Text link Accessibilty: aria-label and title Deque… [Read More]

Building an accessible autocomplete control Adam Silver explains in detail how to build an accessible autocomplete component, taking into account the noJS experience, announcing results to screen readers, hiding suggestions ‘on blur’, keyboard support and endonym/typo support. It’s always surprising just how complicated autocompletes can be, and this is a really good example of one… [Read More]