Category: week11y

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Candidate recommendation version of WCAG 2.2 published

September 6th 2022 marks the first update since May 2021. According to w3.org:

A Candidate Recommendation is a document that satisfies the technical requirements of the Working Group that produced it and their dependencies, and has already received wide review. W3C publishes a Candidate Recommendation to signal to the wider community that it is time to do a final review [and to] gather implementation experience.

The document is considered complete and fit for purpose… No further refinement to the text is expected without additional implementation experience and testing; additional features in a later revision may however be expected.

You can see the announcement on Twitter, which links to a page summarising what’s new in WCAG 2.2. One of the interesting ones is Success Criterion 3.2.6 Consistent Help, which has an example of a site’s ‘help chatbot’ feature that should be accessed in a consistent way, e.g. from a button on the bottom right corner of the page.

SC 3.3.7 Accessible Authentication suggests giving users ways of logging into services via an email link, for those that don’t use password managers and find it difficult to remember their passwords. And a niche one, SC 3.3.9 Redundant Entry, requires that if users have to enter the same information again in the same process, the app should auto-fill the information rather than make the user re-type it.

Thanks to David Cox for bringing news of the WCAG update to my attention.

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Preparing for the physical world through the digital

Two articles caught my eye recently.

In Ipswich station gets virtual tour to help passengers with accessibility requirements, we learn how Greater Anglia has launched an online tour of Ipswich rail station. It uses 360 degree photography to allow people to explore the platforms, the waiting room, and the toilets. There’s also an ‘autopilot’ tool allowing customers to select their destination location within the station and be automatically guided to it.

The aim is to reduce anxiety about getting around, to help people to plan their journey in advance, and to help people confirm whether or not the station facilities are accessible to them. It’s been developed with technology from The Virtual Tour company and with the help of feedback from Greater Anglia’s Accessibility Panel.

A dozen of Greater Anglia’s busiest stations are now covered by the technology, including Cambridge, Harlow Town, Stansted Airport and Norwich.

The next article is Lanarkshire charity shop launches new tool WelcoMe to improve accessibility for disabled customers.

WelcoMe is a website where customers can share with venues their access needs, anticipated arrival time and reason for visiting, for the best possible chance of an accessible and welcoming experience. The site also gives the shop team training in how to best meet the needs of the customer.

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Improving accessibility with accessibility acceptance criteria

A GOV.UK blog post from 2018, describing GDS’s use of ‘acceptance criteria’ for accessibility testing.

These criteria are more specific than general WCAG guidance, and concentrate on specific checks to make at the component level for specific components. For example, GDS’ accessible autocomplete component must:

• be focusable with a keyboard
• enable the user to navigate the available matches using touch or keyboard
• inform the user when a match is selected
• inform the user which number the currently selected match is – for example, 1 of 3 (optional)
• inform the user if a match is pre-selected
• …and so on

These criteria are a way of recording decisions made early on in development, and provide a sense check against making breaking changes when iterating the component in future. They also serve to raise awareness of accessibility issues from the start.

To write criteria such as these, start with accessibility needs by identifying where there is a high risk of introducing an accessibility barrier, and documenting how to prevent it. The hard work has often already been done in the WCAG guidelines, so extract rules pertaining to what you’re building, and link back to the guidelines for context.

Criteria are most useful when they’re specific and testable. Don’t be too generic. Also avoid defining the solution; describe an outcome instead.

Continue to refine your criteria over time, e.g. when encountering bugs, add further criteria and treat them like a failing unit test.

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Mac VoiceOver Testing the Simple Way

Scott Vandehey writes about a familiar problem: getting comfortable testing with VoiceOver. It’s an experience that can make new users feel, as he puts it, “overwhelmed”.

The first issue is with enabling VoiceOver; Scott could never remember the CMD + F5 keyboard shortcut. On newer MacBooks, Scott recommends triple-clicking the TouchID button instead, which is the shortcut for opening the Accessibility Shortcuts panel, from which you can enable VoiceOver.

To avoid having to go via the panel, you can also go to System Preferences -> Accessibility -> Shortcut and uncheck everything except VoiceOver. This means triple-clicking the TouchID button will immediately enable VoiceOver.

As Scott only uses VoiceOver for testing, he uses the visual caption panel instead of listening to the speech, which he has muted by opening the VoiceOver Utility -> Speech -> Mute speech.

With VoiceOver configured, Scott’s approach to testing is to TAB through all the content on the page, which doubles up as a test that all appropriate elements are reachable and have focus styles. This approach commonly reveals issues with lack of context around interactive elements, e.g. a button that simply says “Menu”.

Next, Scott uses the Rotor to show a list of particular items in the page, such as headings and links. This is a useful way to check page structure and to ensure that all links have enough description.

Finally, using VO + →, Scott reads the entire content of the page. He acknowledges most screen reader users won’t do this, but it often brings up some little surprises.

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Visit for a surprise

Eric Bailey raises the interesting dilemma of what link text you should provide on an ‘easter egg’ link to Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up” YouTube video.

WCAG SC 2.4.4: Link Purpose (In Context) might indicate that you should let the user know exactly what’s at the end of that link. “YouTube: Rick Astley – Never Gonna Give You Up (Official Music Video), contains auto-playing media”, or such like.

Alternatively, you could go the other way and just have alt text of “Cryptic icon” and provide no clue at all, like sighted users would experience.

Eric picks out an example from the WCAG docs and emphasises the last sentence:

The word guava in the following sentence “One of the notable exports is guava” is a link. The link could lead to a definition of guava, a chart listing the quantity of guava exported or a photograph of people harvesting guava. Until the link is activated, all readers are unsure and the person with a disability is not at any disadvantage.

The goal is to preserve the author’s intentional act, which is to create a sense of curiousity.

Eric eventually lands on “Visit for a surprise, contains autoplaying media”, arguing that “Cryptic icon” does not provide the enticement, and that it is important to at least flag that there’s autoplaying media. Ideally, he says, sighted users should be warned of this too.

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Welcome to another issue of week11y – this one is a VR special!

Resident Evil 4 VR update adds accessibility options for comfort

Resident Evil 4 on the Oculus Quest 2 – which I own, and think is brilliant! – has just had an update, concentrating primarily on accessibility options.

Your waist and chest height parameters are now configurable, making it easier to grab your weapon etc. Someone in the comments said they used to have to duck to walk through doors, despite not being particularly tall!

The colour of the laser sight can now be adjusted according to your preferences.

Finally, the protagonist can now be “steered using hand movements, which can be assigned to either the left or right controller”.

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Accessibility Virtual Reality Meetup: What Is It Like in Spatial?

Meryl Evans documents her experience of using Spatial, a virtual reality environments for events, to host the Accessibility Virtual Reality (A11yVR) Meetup.

Spatial offers multiple ways to participate, including using a VR headset, a mobile app, or joining via the browser. Joining from the latter, you can navigate the environment using WASD keys.

Spatial supports automatic captions, but it is a ‘pro’ feature and costs extra to enable. The company are apparently passing on costs from Microsoft, who charge for Azure captioning technology. Meryl hopes that the two companies can reach an agreement without burdening users with extra costs, as accessibility should be built in, not a paid extra.

The captions themselves have quirks: when Meryl enabled them, they were captioning what she was saying, not just what other people are saying. The captions can also be hard to see, with sometimes poor contrast and no way of customising them. And one of the speakers could not get their captions to work, at all – down to some unspecified macOS issue.

Some things worked quite well. For users who found movement from other peoples’ avatars distracting from the main presentation, they were able to switch to ‘object view’ to see only the presentation and nothing else.

Auto avatar creation, from a user’s photo, worked well, and avatars were recognisable representations of their real world counterparts. Users could also stream their webcams above their avatars’ heads, which helped show they were paying attention.

Meryl felt the lack of chat box functionality was a real barrier for people, who had to resort to posting virtual ‘sticky notes’ to communicate. These were buggy and hard to read.

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How Virtual Reality Makes It Possible to Experience Different Vision Conditions

VoxelKei, a Japanese “VR world developer”, has created NearSighted Classroom (VRChat) to allow other people to see what it’s like to have short-sightedness.

After sharing the world on Twitter (where you can see a video of the world in action), the developer received positive feedback and requests from many people to have him simulate other eye conditions such as astigmatism, presbyopia and colour blindness. He added those features within a month of the first release.

You can tune the settings to match your own vision, and any friends who have joined the world with you will be able to see how you see the world!

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How Can a Blind Person Use Virtual Reality?

Jesse Anderson, who runs IllegallySighted on YouTube, shares advice for creating accessible virtual reality experiences. He reviews games from his perspective as a blind person. There are games designed specifically for screen reader users, but these tend to be more simplistic and don’t hold his attention for long. Jesse mainly reviews mainstream games, which are becoming increasingly accessible. Third-party mods make other games accessible, such as Stardew Access for Stardew Valley.

One title Jesse is particularly impressed with is The Last of Us Part II, for its 60+ accessibility options, making it fully playable end to end by a blind person, even on higher difficulty settings. Highlights include menu narration, high contrast mode toggle, a built-in magnifier, and the navigation system.

Jesse spends most of this interview talking about challenges in VR. There are currently no commercially available accessibility tools for adding things like screen magnifier, screen reader, or high contrast to a VR dashboard or game interface. Jesse notes that “there was an amazing accessibility suite called SeeingVR, developed as a research project by Microsoft, but it never left the research stage”.

It’s these text and user interfaces that present the biggest trouble for Jesse, more so than the ‘game’ elements such as aiming and shooting a weapon. Even accessing the accessibility settings to make games more playable can be an impossible task because the menus themselves are inaccessible.

Jesse joined XR Access in 2020. It is an organisation “devoted to improving the accessibility of both virtual and augmented reality”, with several working groups dedicated to different accessibility requirements. One group focusses on the business case for XR, while another concentrates on development standards. It is in the process of developing resources and prototypes that developers can use when they are trying to figure out how to make their apps more accessible.

The top things Jesse recommends developers include in their VR experiences are: different text size options, magnification and menu narration features, and most importantly, offering all 6 degrees of tracking, so that if a user needs to get closer to something in the environment to see it properly, they can simply lean in or move closer to it.

Like the web, Jesse suggests that the platform itself needs to provide a standard base level of accessibility, such as a system wide screen reader. Unfortunately, existing screen readers aren’t compatible with the games themselves, which are powered by Unreal and Unity.

Further reading/watching: Virtual Reality in the Dark: VR Development for People Who Are Blind.

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Virtual Reality Accessibility: The Importance of Comfort Ratings and Reducing Motion

Meryl Evans talks about ‘comfort ratings’ for VR experiences. These are like content ratings for films and games, e.g. “PG” for “Parental Guidance”.

Meta’s comfort ratings (for headsets such as Oculus) are as follows:

• Comfortable – appropriate for most people. Generally no camera movement or player motion.
• Moderate – appropriate for many. Might incorporate some camera movement or player motion.
• Intense – not appropriate for many. Incorporates significant camera movement, player motion or disorientating content and effects.
• Unrated – the developer hasn’t set a rating.

The Oculus app store lacks a filter facility, so you can’t search by comfort rating. Worse, Steam’s VR app store does not yet have a concept of comfort ratings.

Meryl calls for a standardised system across all VR platforms, moderated by a neutral third party such as Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB). It should not be left to developers to decide; their motivation to broaden the potential audience and sales by falsely marketing their experience as ‘Comfortable’ is a conflict of interest.

Meryl finishes with a call to action for several organisations, including a request for headset platforms to build in a “reduced motion” mode.

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My War On Animation

Article on The Verge, as part of July’s Accessibility Week.

The author writes about their experiences navigating the web as someone who finds any animation a stimulatory overload. They acknowledge that there are documented standards for the ‘limits’ of animation on the web, such as keeping gifs to five seconds maximum. However, the documented standards don’t go far enough for the author, who finds it difficult to deal with any animations.

There’s a really succinct paragraph describing the workarounds that people resort to, and the negative knock-on effects that can have:

I can block anything ending in .gif, but it usually renders buttons nonoperative. I can load a site without styles, but usually, the result is not very enjoyable to use. I can block ads, but then it deprives the nice websites I like to read (and write for) of revenue.

They point out some technological implementations that work for all users:

There is, of course, a way to bridge this divide, and bizarrely, one of my allies is Twitter, which struck a decisive blow when it allowed users to freeze autoplay on all moving content, including GIFs. Users who love them can post them; users who don’t simply see a still frame. What’s good for reducing server load is also good for the case exceptions such as mine.

The article ends with a call to action for developers, to give users control to shape their own experience. Give people toggles to opt in and out of animations and other potential accessibility barriers.

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It’s Mid-2022 and Browsers (Mostly Safari) Still Break Accessibility via Display Properties

Adrian Roselli does some manual testing of the display CSS property – with a particular focus on display: contents – across different browsers, meticulously recording the results here.

For the uninitiated, there’s a CSS Tricks article about display: contents. You can apply this to ‘wrappers’ around content, and it makes the container ‘disappear’, making the child elements appear as siblings. This allows for such elements to appear in the same CSS grid or flexbox together, and prevents the need to forego HTML semantics for the benefit of layout.

However, as the CSS Display draft points out, “this is not implemented correctly in major browsers, so using this feature on the Web must be done with care as it can prevent accessibility tools from accessing the element’s semantics”. Adrian substantiates this, confirming that, for VoiceOver, Safari in particular will fail to correctly parse tables, announce lists or make buttons easily actionable when display: contents is applied.

It’s no wonder developers are calling Safari “the new Internet Explorer”.

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How to write user stories for accessibility

Not a particularly long article, but I may as well cut straight to the chase with some examples:

As a keyboard-only user, I want to know where I am on the screen so that I can perform an action or navigate to other areas of the site.

Or

As a screen reader user, I want to hear the text equivalent for each image button so that I will know what function it performs.

Accessibility user stories are just like any other user story: they start with a persona, identify the desired goal, and define the benefit to the user.

The article links to some further reading, including this GOV.UK blog post from 2018.

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Am I disabled?

“With my pen hovering over a form, there is no easy answer: better to provoke stigma with support, or resist classification?”

Joanne Limburg writes about the dilemma she faces when filling in forms that ask “Do you consider yourself to be a disabled person?”

Joanne was diagnosed with autistic spectrum disorder (ASD) around the age of 42. Until then, she’d considered herself non-disabled. Even now, when she pictures disability, she pictures stock images of wheelchair icons, guide dogs, other more visible disabilities.

“Inside every Yes box is a flat, painted wheelchair stick-figure, asking me what I’m doing in their parking space”. Joanne considers ticking the No box, as her disability is invisible, and she can “sneak out in an able-bodied disguise”. Then there’s Prefer not to say – when that’s an option on the form.

Joanna says she tries to pick the option based on her best guess about what the asker thinks disability is. Does the asker think in terms of the social model of disability, for example?

“I’ve come to understand that when I pass as non-disabled, when I say No, the best that I can hope to be is an inferior version of an ideal of normality that allows only for the narrowest range of body types, cognitive styles and life trajectories, that equates the worth of a person with her economic productivity, that fetishes independence and disavows our connections to each other, and that seeks to discriminate arbitrarily between those who are allowed their full humanity and those who are denied it.”

Joanna shares her default answer to the question at the end of the essay. I won’t spoil it here!

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This week is a ‘social media special’, where I cover recent social media stories centered around accessibility.

Misuse of Twitter’s Alt Text Feature Draws Criticism From Accessibility Advocates

Since 2016, when Twitter first made it possible to write alt text, the text was only really retrievable by screen reader users. The result was that only a small fraction of images ever had alt text written for them.

In April, Twitter made it easier for all users to view alt text. The increased visibility has led to a rise in misuse. Instead of describing images, some accounts use the alt text field to “add hyperlinks, caption credits and source citations”, or “as a place to hide jokes, supplementary information or alternative captions from the main timeline”.

Critics say that Twitter bungled the roll-out, by not properly explaining the purpose of the alt text feature. It has started testing a new setting: a pop-up that gives more information and reminds people to add descriptions to their images. Some users would like to see Twitter go further, by detecting alt text misuse and flagging it to the author, by extending the 1000 character alt text limit, and by allowing people to retrospectively add alt text to images.

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TikTok’s new captions and translation features are all about accessibility

This Digital Trends article covers a TikTok announcement about new accessibility tools coming to the social media platform. It is currently on a gradual roll-out and is only available on select videos.

Viewers will now have the option to turn on auto-generated captions for videos – something that only creators have been able to do until now.

TikTok will also be supporting translations for captions and for ‘stickers’ that creators embed in their videos. The following languages will be supported initially, with more to come: English, Portuguese, German, Indonesian, Italian, Korean, Mandarin, Spanish, and Turkish.

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This Toronto TikToker has gained a big following by reviewing restaurants. But her focus is on more than the food

Taylor Lindsay-Noel has over 17,000 followers and half a million views on her videos on TikTok. She reviews restaurants, but with a focus on the accessibility of the venue.

Taylor is quadriplegic and uses a 350 pound power chair, so even a single step stair at the entrance can be a big accessibility issue. Taylor researches restaurants online before visiting them, and calls ahead of time to double check that the venue is accessible, so is not afraid to give critical reviews when that turns out not to be the case!

People have been reaching out to Taylor to thank her, as it can be difficult to get the true picture of a place online, and it can be hard to find accessible eateries. Whilst her reviews are largely limited to Toronto establishments, Taylor is succeeding in raising awareness more widely, noting that a lot of “able-bodied people who want to do their part” will now spot accessibility issues and complain about them, after seeing her videos.

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NASA’s alt text

This tweet from NASA’s official Twitter account has been heralded as a great example of alt text. According to an article I covered earlier: “Accessibility advocates were delighted. NASA’s alt text was thoughtful and evocative, but most important did its job of capturing an image fully with words to make it accessible to all.”

The background of space is black. Thousands of galaxies appear all across the view. Their shapes and colors vary. Some are various shades of orange, others are white. Most stars appear blue, and are sometimes as large as more distant galaxies that appear next to them. A very bright star is just above and left of center. It has eight bright blue, long diffraction spikes. Between 4 o’clock and 6 o’clock in its spikes are several very bright galaxies. A group of three are in the middle, and two are closer to 4 o’clock. These galaxies are part of the galaxy cluster SMACS 0723, and they are warping the appearances of galaxies seen around them. Long orange arcs appear at left and right toward the center.

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The Hidden History of Screen Readers

This lengthy but approachable article by The Verge covers the history of JAWS and NVDA.

Ted Henter lost his sight in a car accident in 1978. Losing his job as a racing driver and mechanical engineer, he studied computer science, having to get volunteers to read programming books and terminal outputs to him.

In his first computing job, Ted got his first “talking computer” (software created by Maryland Computer Services), which read one character at a time. This meant Ted could finally work without assistance. In the next version, it could read one word at a time, and Ted became the most known user, regularly calling the company for tech support.

Ted was sent on a business trip to Chicago to train a businessman, Bill Joyce, in using the software. The two became friends and in 1987 created “Henter-Joyce”, releasing their own DOS screen reader called JAWS (Job Access With Speech). It had Braille support, dual cursors and a scripting language for users.

As companies moved from DOS to Windows, a graphical interface, screen reader development became more challenging. Henter-Joyce released JAWS for Windows in 1995. Microsoft ended up buying the source code and created its own native version, but that eventually went nowhere, and JAWS retained the majority of the market share all the way through to 2019.

The price of JAWS – $1000 for a home license – was prohibitive, especially to the 89% of people with vision loss from low and middle income countries. In 2019, NVDA (NonVisual Desktop Access) overtook JAWS in popularity. It is free and open source, developed by two friends from Australia: Michael Curran and Jamie Teh.

Michael started it as a prototype in 2006. Within a year, Mozilla funded Michael to attend the CSUN Assistive Technology Conference, where Michael met like-minded enthusiasts. Michael and Jamie then set up the NV Access nonprofit to govern the project long-term. Initially viewed as ‘fine for home use, but not professional use’, NVDA has come a long way, with contributors from all over the world.

The article contains lots of useful statistics. For example, in 2020, the estimated number of blind people worldwide was 49.1 million, comparable to the population of Spain or South Korea. An additional 255 million people have moderate to severe visual impairment. And in a recent Stackoverflow survey of developers, 1,142 people – approximately 1.7% of total participants – replied, “I am blind / have difficulty seeing.”

How to get the best out of Accessibility features in Windows 11

This is a useful overview of native accessibility features in Windows 11. I think it’s useful to occasionally remind ourselves what is available and think about how we should build our sites and apps to not get in the way of such features.

All of the features are viewable in one place (accessed via WINDOWS AND I and heading to the Accessibility section).

There’s a slider to change the system text size, as well as options to change your cursor style. You can opt in to having scrollbars visible the whole time – the disappearing scrollbar is something that catches me out a far bit on my Mac! (Though macOS also has options to configure this).

The WINDOWS AND + shortcut toggles the screen magnifier, and activating it twice switches to greater magnification. There are colour filters, configured for different kinds of colour blindness.

Windows Narrator is a built-in screen reader. You can also enable on-screen notifications to accompany audio notifications. Finally, there is speech recognition and voice typing.

All of the above accessibility features are accompanied by screenshots in the linked article.

The Guide To Windows High Contrast Mode

In this Smashing Magazine article, Cristian Díaz covers everything you need to know about this accessibility setting, which we’ll abbreviate as WHCM below. This is a Windows feature that users can enable to replace the colours on websites and applications, in order to increase readability and reduce noise.

WHCM is used by around 30% of Windows users with low vision, and around 4% of all active Windows devices. WHCM is misleadingly named, as many of its users actually opt for a colour palette that has a lower contrast than the default.

Cristian points out that semantics are incredibly important in WHCM. Take this example of three different elements with the same class:

<div role="button" class="button" tabindex=0>
  Not a button
</div>
<button class="button">
  Definitely a button
</button>
<a href="#" class="button">
  This is a link
</a>

They’re given the same styling, so would usually look the same. But in WHCM, they all appear different, as WHCM only looks at which underlying HTML element is being used.

Another area to pay close attention to is the use of background styling. A common pattern is to give ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ buttons different background colours, but in WHCM, the background colours are removed, and it can be hard to distinguish between the button types (or even to know that it is a button at all, if you’ve set a border/outline of zero!). A workaround is to set a transparent border instead, which will still hide the border visually in normal mode, but ensure that there is a button-identifying border in WHCM mode. As a rule of thumb, Cristian says:

outline remains as the only reliable way to apply a focus state on an element in WHCM.

If you’re going to use something different to highlight a focus state in an element, add the property outline-color: transparent as a fallback [for WHCM].

WHCM will remove gradients applied using background-image, but will respect background images that use the url() value (something that I think has changed since my frontend developer days at the BBC!). The exception is background image in the body element, in Firefox, which apparently won’t render.

Cristian only briefly touches on currentColor, which can be used to set things like SVG colours to the same colour as whatever WHCM is using for link text. He caveats this though, saying it won’t work in Chromium based browsers, due to the default colour value of SVGs being none. Luckily there is a new forced-color-adjust property which can be set to get WHCM to obey it.

There’s also a forced-colors media query, so that you can target your WHCM overrides only for when WHCM is enabled. Within the media query, we can access system colors and can use them to ensure we style a consistent UI, whatever our markup. For example:

@media screen and (forced-colors: active) {
  .link {
    background-color: LinkText;
  }
  
  .link:visited {
    background-color: VisitedText;
  }
  
  .link:focus span {
    outline-color: Highlight;
  }
}

There is a useful set of resources to read at the end of the article.

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Microsoft and Peel school board collaborate to launch Minecraft world focused on accessibility

For those who don’t know, Minecraft has an education edition. (I wish I had this while I was in school!).

That edition now has a new world, called BuildAbility. In partnership with America’s Peel District School Board (PDSB), it was launched on May 10th worldwide.

BuildAbility is designed to “help students understand, identify, and work to eliminate accessibility barriers in their school and community”. Students learn about physical and technological barriers, as well as organisational attitudes and communication issues. They’re then encouraged to create solutions to those problems, in an open play area, trying to create the most accessible and inclusive experience.

In the world, students will encounter physical barriers that disable wheelchair users, high noise levels in populous areas like the mall, etc. They can then rebuild parts of the world in an accessible way. Watch this brief video demonstrating the world (39s).

Best Practices for Overlays

Ken Nakata writes a thought-provoking article about controversial accessibility overlays.

Ken was once opposed to overlays, but has come around to the idea, on the basis that they can work harmoniously with other accessibility initiatives. He concedes that the damage has already been done by inaccurate marketing of overlay companies, who falsely claim they can make websites fully accessible with a single line of code. But if we can allow overlays to mature and have these companies taper their claims, Ken envisages a future where overlays are widely used and useful.

For example, a customer might hire an accessibility consultant, who spots a WCAG violation with a tab panel on their website. The developers fix that panel, but in the meantime, an overlay is programmed to spot and fix similar matches that don’t exactly match the original. As users come across these panels in the wild, the overlay does its best to fix the issue, and also automatically notifies the developers about the bug.

Ken thinks overlays are an inevitability because:

1. There is simply too much inaccessible content out there, and it won’t ever be fixed.
2. Not all users are experts – more traditional assistive technology can be difficult to use.
3. Technology gets better all the time.

Ken finishes with a list of rules he believes all overlay producers should follow, containing good guidelines such as not automatically applying settings, and giving all users the option to quickly dismiss the panel.

Definitely worth a read.

GAConf

This game accessibility conference is happening on October 24th and 25th. But there is plenty of archive footage from previous conferences.

It covers a really interesting range of topics, such as accessibility in first person games, gaming with a muscle disease, bringing accessibility to storefront descriptions and audio-based games mechanics. Looks like one to watch, even if you’re not in the games development sector.

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Only two articles this week, but both super interesting, and related to one another. They both concern big tech sites that pander to the majority at the expense of disabled users.

The negative impact of stylised captions on TikTok and Instagram

It used to be that there was not enough captioned content on social media. People were posting videos but not captioning them, either because it wasn’t possible on the platform at the time or because they couldn’t be bothered.

Auto captioning has become more and more popular, and it’s now quite simple to enable closed captions on your social media videos. As Courtney Craven puts it on their LinkedIn post, the resulting accuracy of caption can be “useless”.

But another problem is how the captions are displayed: there’s an increasing trend for captions to display

one

or two

words at

a time.

Courtney touches on some of the issues with that, as does accessibility consultant, Meryl Evans. This style of caption can be really hard to follow, and detract from the video itself, as one is so focussed on trying to keep up with the text. You understand language ‘as a unit’, not as one word at a time.

I don’t think we can blame the content creators; they’ve been given a tool, and they’re using it. But social media companies need to work harder to not build inaccessibility into the tools they provide people.

I’d be interested to know what kind of impact this has on screen reader users – send me an email if you have any insights!

Tech Journalism’s Accessibility Problem

Monica Chin, computing reporter at The Verge, writes about the lack of accessibility content in tech magazines. She notes that most accessibility content is written by freelance journalists, or by staff journalists whose primary focus is something else.

The lack of mainstream content makes it hard for disabled consumers to know whether the latest game, mobile phone or software will work for them. “I’ll often have to research reviews and watch like, six or seven so I can find all the information”, says Chris Reardon.

Some journalists feel that the solution is to hire an accessibility reporter, to provide dedicated accessibility coverage, such as accessibility reviews that sit alongside standard product reviews. Others feel that every tech reporter should have accessibility in mind when writing content.

Monica also highlights the risk of perpetuating harmful tropes and stereotypes. The solution isn’t to flood magazines with stories about ‘inspirational’ disabled people (a phenomenon disabled journalists have been protesting for years).

There’s also the risk that exclusively allocating accessibility articles to disabled journalists has them become the ‘token person’ to represent specific topics. That said, journalists with a related disability should be given the first opportunity to cover an article, if they wish. John Loeffler writes “it’s one thing for me to talk about the Microsoft Surface Adaptive Kit. It’s another for someone who’s like, when this review is done, I’m going to be using this on my own personal device”.

An example of where mainstream opinion differs from accessibility focussed views is the ‘touch bar’ integrated with MacBook Pros. CNET, The Verge and Engadget have all derided it as a useless piece of hardware that nobody asked for. (I happen to agree. They’re also prone to hardware failure; my sister has had no ends of issues with this aspect of her relatively new MacBook, just outside the warranty period!).

But Steven Aquino writes about how useful he finds the accessibility features of the touch bar. It makes shortcuts easier to trigger for those who lack the fine motor skills required for keyboard shortcuts. It allows the sending of emails or adding of emojis with a single tap, instead of multiple interactions.

Steven often felt in a minority, reporting on this. The mainstream sites just don’t touch on this stuff. Monica’s article is a call to action for tech reporting to do better.

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Purchasing Power Parity

Accessibility of content based on price and economics is not something I’ve covered often, so I’m glad to have come across this really interesting article.

Sophia Lucero writes about a trend she’s noticed in online courses and magazines: websites are beginning to charge different prices based on where in the world you’re visiting from. They generally charge less if you’re in, say, the Philippines, versus if you visit from the USA, on the basis that it’s a lot more difficult for someone from the former to raise the same amount of disposable income as someone from the latter. This is well explained by the Big Mac index.

Many independent creators that are big names in the frontend world are offering this, from Wes Bos and Kent Dodds to Sara Vieira and Julia Evans. Sophia notes that they all seem to have rolled out their own implementations, based on their own “specific, personal reasoning that differed from one another”. There’s a certain amount of secrecy into the underlying methodologies used by some, as they (understandably) want to avoid being pulled into an economics fight. As a guide, you could use the calculator by Jack McDade, or for a (paid) automated implementation, you could use Parity Bar.

The decision to roll out PPP is, for many, an altruistic decision, and relies on honesty, since it is fairly simple to spoof one’s location. However, it has actually increased revenue for the creators (50% in the case of Chris Ferdinandi), as the fact more people can afford it means there are higher sales.

WordPress Accessibility Day Returns November 2-3, 2022

Deborah Edwards-Oñoro tells us about a virtual, accessibility focussed conference in November. Full details over at wpaccessibility.day.

For a taste of what to expect from the day, check out the talks from 2020. It looks to be a good mix of beginner and advanced accessibility concepts, as well as technical and non-technical. There are some CMS/WordPress focussed talks, but a lot look quite generic, so this looks open and applicable to all.

You can sign up for email updates on the website. For now, pencil November 2nd and 3rd in your diary!

ScreenReader app

A project I came across recently was the ScreenReader app, which is a learning aid to help you to use VoiceOver on iOS and TalkBack on Android. It contains exercises to navigate by headings and links, and to select, copy and paste text.

The app is an initiative of the Appt Foundation. Its source code is available on GitHub under screenreader-android and screenreader-ios repositories.

Divs are bad!

An article by Manuel Matuzović, which he openly admits is a clickbait title! Manuel concedes that the <div> is useful for additional elements for styling, for structuring content when no other suitable element exists, and for when you need custom landmarks. He then lists the issues with using <div> incorrectly.

Using a <div> inside a <details> element, for example, can break how the element is supposed to render in browsers, and might cause screen readers to not recognise the <summary> element properly:

<details>
  <div>
    <summary>Show info</summary>
    Hi, I'm the info!
  </div>
</details>

Manuel works through plenty of other common examples (such as <ul><li> markup) which should not have a <div> nested in between the elements. It’s quicker to say where it can be used, and that’s in definition lists. The following example is fine:

<dl>
  <div>
    <dt>Key:</dt>
    <dd>Value</dd>
  </div>
  <div>
    <dt>Key:</dt>
    <dd>Value</dd>
  </div>
</dl>

Manuel recommends installing Deque’s HTML validator bookmarklet to validate your web pages. It works on both server-rendered and client-rendered pages.

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I’m back, having got married, been on honeymoon, and perhaps inevitably, caught COVID. So, a little later than planned, please enjoy the latest issue of frequent11y!

Robles v. Domino’s Settles After Six Years of Litigation

This case concerns Guillermo Robles, a blind customer of Domino’s who was unable to order a custom pizza from their website or app, so sued them under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).

I wrote about this case in my first ever issue of week11y, in October 2019. At the time, the US Supreme Court had just declined Domino’s appeal of a Ninth Circuit decision to overturn a district court’s decision to dismiss the lawsuit. (American law is complicated. Also, disclaimer: I’m no law expert).

Since then, in June 2021, the district court ruled in Robles’ favour, concluding that the website was not fully accessible and that a 45 minute wait on a telephone line was not a reasonable substitute. There’s lots of interesting information in the ADA Title III analysis of that ruling, such as Domino’s own expert not being able to place an order using a screen reader. There is also some distinction between Domino’s website and their mobile app, which are treated differently in law – the case was only allowed to continue regarding the app, rather than the website.

In what is believed to be a final end to the case, the parties have now settled out of court. The terms of that resolution are not (and may never be) known.

Please Stop Using Grey Text

“W3 AGWG Invited Expert” and Readability and Color Science Researcher, Andrew Somers, argues that the WCAG 2 contrast specifications have been harmful to accessibility, as they don’t factor in how colours are perceived. Some colour combinations that shouldn’t pass, do, and some that should, don’t.

Since the introduction of WCAG 2, Andrew argues there’s been a shift to using grey text instead of black. This breaks a 1000 year precedent of printed texts worldwide. Andrew acknowledges the irony in making this point on his article, which is hosted on Medium.com and which uses grey text.

Andrew also highlights issues with dark mode, where WCAG 2 contrast math “is not capable of providing useful contrast values”. The screenshot he uses to demonstrate the issue is pretty scathing.

There is often a counter-argument to the use of black text: that it causes too much contrast and can be uncomfortable to read. Andrew’s counter-argument is that it is better to slightly darken the background behind the text, rather than lighten the text itself.

Over 96% of Government Websites Hide Disabled Men and Women on Their Site

This article raises an important point about how photos of people are sourced and used.

Sites such as Shutterstock are used to find stock photos of people to use on websites. Searching for “happy person”, “person smiling” or “happy face” rarely surfaces any pictures of visibly disabled individuals. However, “a quick search of ‘person in wheelchair’ revealed that plenty of images of happy disabled people do exist”.

The article investigates an example image and concludes that this happens due to the way the images are tagged. The image in question is tagged with keywords centred around the person’s disability and age. The image therefore won’t show up in general searches and is “unlikely to be used on non-medical web pages”.

According to the article, just 24 out of 502 government websites showed any photos of disabled people on non medical pages. However, this figure includes blog posts about a specific organisation or person, as well as articles about the Paralympics. It is extremely rare to see a stock photo including a visibly disabled person, for a general page.

A few reasons are cited for this trend. Most countries have a ‘social norm’; a “stereotyped idea of how the average citizen looks”. When creating content designed to resonate with a wide audience, photos of the social norm are used to cater for the majority. It is hypothesised that not using pictures of the social norm might lead to fewer ‘conversions’ (clicks), reducing the perceived success of the web page.

The article concludes with an appeal for government sites: to “normalise the use of diverse photographs, including individuals from all walks of life”. [This] is the only way to create an expectation for inclusion”.

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It’s been a couple of weeks since the last issue of week11y – work has been busy! This week is a ‘hardware special’, covering some interesting developments in the world of physical technology.

This will also be my only newsletter in June. This week, I’m getting married, and then off to Scandinavia for a couple of weeks! See you again in July 👋

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Whisper’s hearing aids use AI to boost speech and reduce noise

Whisper is a startup that is developing hearing aids that self-tune over time, using AI. Traditional hearing aids require frequent adjustments, which can put people off wearing them. The CEO was inspired when his father asked to sit in a quiet corner of the café so that he could hear him properly, and he realised that he could make a difference in helping people connect better with their loved ones.

Two earpieces that take in and transmit sound are paired with a pocket-sized hub called Whisper Brain that wirelessly drives a sound separation engine. The engine’s algorithms, which were trained on a proprietary dataset, separate speech from noise in real time. Unlike traditional hearing aids, which amplify everything in a room, the engine hones in on particular sources

The system costs $139 per month at time of writing, which is less than the $179 originally quoted in the article (which was published in October 2020). Other companies are available – there are similar offerings from MicroTech, Widex and Starkey.

New sensor technology helps blind and visually impaired pedestrians avoid hazards

Intelligent Material Solutions, Inc. have patented an “intelligent material” of rare earth crystals embedded in paint or thermoplastics. The crystals can be grown to any shape or size and exhibit unique emission and absorption spectra and tuneable energy conversions.

Paired with sensors mounted or integrated with a cane, users can use a smart device to gather geolocation feedback and receive enhanced situational awareness that is far more accurate than existing technologies such as GPS.

The technology is in its early stages but could be used to guide users to public transportation, retail entrances, pavement exits and other locations.

This 3D printed controller allows you to game with one hand

This Facebook video (3 minutes) demonstrates an attachment for a standard PlayStation controller, allowing you to access all of the buttons on the device using just one hand.

The attachment was designed and 3D-printed by Akaki Kuumeri and is quite fascinating to see in action! Designs are free to download and print, but Akaki also offers fully printed and assembled versions in their Etsy store. Both left-handed and right-handed versions are available. Akaki also designs attachments for other consoles such as Xbox Series X.

Whilst it’s disappointing not to see officially supported adapters from the console manufacturers themselves, I’m pleased to see creative solutions being devised in the community.

Man Who Is Paralyzed Communicates By Imagining Handwriting

A man left quadriplegic after a freak accident has taken part in a study of a system called BrainGate2, developed at Stanford. The system relies on electrodes surgically implanted near the part of the brain that controls movement.

The man imagines writing individual characters by hand, and the computer learned to decode the distinct patterns with 95% accuracy. He can now type at a rate of 90 characters per minute.

I first covered this technology 2.5 years ago, in dai11y 25/11/2019. That system was developed at Chicago, and had a rate of around 66 characters per minute. So the technology is improving – which is fantastic. I just hope the surgically implanted hardware doesn’t go the way of the Second Sight implants and become unsupported.

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Did you know that you can subscribe to dai11y, week11y, fortnight11y or month11y updates! Every newsletter gets the same content; it is your choice to have short, regular emails or longer, less frequent ones. Curated with ♥ by developer @ChrisBAshton.