Welcome to the first week11y of 2023! I’ve had a nice little break from the newsletter, but am looking forward to getting going again. But first: a big thank you to everyone who completed my survey. It’s really useful knowing what’s most important to you (so much so that I’ll leave it open, in case… [Read More]

We’re fast approaching Christmas, and I have a gift for you. You can shape the future direction of this newsletter by filling in my survey! It would really help me to understand what you like or don’t like, which subjects you’d like to read more about, all that lovely stuff. All I Want for Christmas… [Read More]

Lefty dentists and inclusive design An article about the barriers faced by left-handed dentists, in what the article author, Robert Stribley, calls “a failure of inclusive design”. Robert’s dentist immediately “became a better dentist” after graduating dental school, as they were able to set up their working environment to best suit them. Barriers occur in… [Read More]

Why you should never use px to set font-size in CSS Josh Collinsworth dispels the myth that it doesn’t matter whether you use px, em or rem for your font sizes. Whilst px stands for “pixels”, it no longer translates into physical pixels on the screen, as browsers scale up pixels on higher resolution screens…. [Read More]

What Does X% of Issues Mean? Adrian Roselli ponders what tools mean when they claim to find up to X% of issues. What do “issues” mean in this context? He ran a Twitter poll with a few options; most people interpreted “issues” to mean ‘issues validating against the 78 Success Criteria from WCAG 2.1’. But… [Read More]

‘Accessibility at the Edge’ W3C CG Is an Overlay Smoke Screen Adrian Roselli brings attention to the Accessibility at the Edge community group, hosted on W3.org. People would be forgiven for assuming that such groups are supported by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), but Adrian talks us through the process, which requires just five… [Read More]

A First Look at the Websites and Software Applications Accessibility Act Bill The “Websites and Software Applications Accessibility Act” (or #A11yAct) has been put forward to the United States Congress. If it succeeds, it will build on the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). Its aim is to lead to clearer regulations for digital accessibility requirements… [Read More]

Brief Note on Super- and Subscript text Adrian Roselli explores how different screen readers deal with superscript and supscript text. Firstly, it’s useful to note that there are multiple different positions of super/sub script, set using the vertical-align CSS property: baseline is used for representing the lower character in fractions and abbreviations, alongside super for… [Read More]

Abbreviations can be problematic Martin Underhill writes about the problems of using abbreviations such as NGL (“not gonna lie”) and how inaccessible these cultural shortcuts can be. There is an official ‘fix’ for this in HTML: <abbr title=”Not gonna lie”>NGL</abbr>, but it doesn’t show a tooltip when a touchscreen user touches it, nor is it… [Read More]

Better accessible names Hidde de Vries shares some great tips for naming your labels and aria-labels: Describe what the thing does, rather than what it looks like, e.g. “Next slide” vs “Arrow right” Frontload the most unique part of the thing, e.g. in a list of albums, use “Midnight Marauders – Album” over “Album –… [Read More]