Category: week11y

Your weekly frequent11y newsletter, brought to you by @ChrisBAshton:

Designing for Web Accessibility in 60 Seconds

UX Designer David Kennedy writes a short article with some useful quick wins for accessibility, focussed around asking questions.

• Is the content specific enough in important areas?
  • People skim when they read. Make sure your link text describes the content of the target link, and use concise headings to form the outline of the page.
• Where does the visual hierarchy put pressure on font sizes and colours?
  • Avoid small font sizes, low colour contrast, relying on colour alone to communicate state.
  • Also avoid confusing alignment, and excessive motion.
• What components are doing too much?
  • Consider avoiding autocomplete and tooltip components, in favour of simpler ones.
• Are all states communicated in an accessible way?
  • Pay careful attention to designs for your error states, disabled states, focus states, etc.

Accessibility: The Biggest Scam in UX

Dot Tomczak draws us in with a clickbaity headline, and rants about designers that claim their work is accessible without being able to back it up.

Dot says that following a WCAG checklist isn’t enough – how many designers have actually included at least one person with a disability in their initial user research?

A nice looking, minimalist, high-contrast design isn’t necessarily an accessible one. As Dot points out, there is such a thing as too much contrast. Designs may break horribly when zoomed in, or may make no sense with assistive technologies. Fonts may be at least 16 pixels in size (good) but the font itself may not be very readable (bad).

Dot implores designers to start including people with impairments, in their user testing. To start using your favourite apps and websites with accessibility settings turned on, to get a feel of how things should work. To test their products with accessibility tools. And above all, to “stop bullshitting that you mastered it – no one did”.

The comments on the article are largely in full support and agreement – including a number of famous faces from the world of accessibility (whose own articles I’ve covered in previous issues of frequent11y!).

Default focus outlines: Don’t remove them!

So many good tips in this article – though don’t be fooled by the title. This isn’t about the native browser focus styles; the participants in this podcast do advocate that it’s fine to provide your own custom focus styles. This is about removing any focus styles whatsoever, and why that’s a bad thing.

Many of us have come across this before: a designer insisting we remove the outline provided by browsers, but not providing their own focus style to replace it with. The analogies in this article are great:

• Focus styles are like streetlights. Even if you think they’re ugly – they’re extremely useful.
• Want to remove focus styles? How about removing all handles from your doors and windows, to avoid breaking the smooth flow of the design.

And some tips:

• Ask designers to try to navigate their own designs via keyboard only.
• Ask what the alternative for the native focus state should be. If the answer is that there shouldn’t be a focus state at all, then this discussion isn’t about the outline.

The article contains a podcast recording and a transcript. Worth a read/listen.

---

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.

Your weekly frequent11y newsletter, brought to you by @ChrisBAshton:

The Future of CSS: CSS Toggles

Article by @bramus, discussing the new CSS Toggles Unofficial Proposal Draft, alongside the demo site for the proposed feature.

“CSS toggles are a mechanism for associating toggleable state with a DOM element”. Perhaps this is best summarised in a code example:

html {
  toggle-root: lightswitch; /* Create a toggle named lightswitch. It will cycle between 0 (inactive, default) and 1 (active) */
}

button {
  toggle-trigger: lightswitch; /* When clicking the button, toggle the lightswitch */
}

html:toggle(lightswitch) {
  /* Styles to apply when the lightswitch toggle is active */
}

This should make it much easier to define global toggles such as dark/light mode, applying reduced motion, switching to low data modes, etc, allowing us to apply the necessary styles without relying on JavaScript.

For now, this is just a prototype, and is subject to change. To start using this today, you’d need to use the polyfill.

I’m Deaf And I Have ‘Perfect’ Speech. Here’s Why It’s Actually A Nightmare.

Rachel Zemach writes about some of the frustrating encounters she’s had, as someone who became Deaf at the age of 10 (and had already learned to speak). Her speech is indistinguishable from someone who is not deaf, and she can ‘lip read’, which is problematic, as we’ll discuss below.

Incidentally, I’d come across the term ‘Deaf’ (with a capital D) before, but wasn’t quite sure when it should be used. Rachel links to an article describing the difference, which essentially comes down to whether or not the subject sees their deafness as an identity; a community that shares a mutual culture and language. Hence Rachel “became Deaf” at the age of 10, and “someone who is not deaf” refers simply to the medical definition of hearing loss. But I digress…

Lip-reading is hard, and pretty inaccurate: “55% to 70% of English is not lip-readable because many sounds are made deep in the mouth or throat”. This makes Rachel’s encounters with waiters and the like all the more frustrating, when, upon realising Rachel can lip-read and speak, they push to communicate only in speech. This contrasts heavily with when Rachel is out with her Deaf friends, who can not or choose not to lip-read/speak, where waiters are far more willing to ‘pantomime’ gestures to communicate.

Rachel has concluded that she will try and avoid speaking in future. She finishes with a request:

If you’re a hearing person, please, when you meet someone who says they can’t hear you, take your cues from them. Do they want you to write what you have to say? Do they want you to take down your mask and speak slowly? Do they want you to pantomime? Deaf and hard-of-hearing people are the experts on how to communicate with them. Ask them openly and earnestly and respect their solutions, which they’ll undoubtedly have.

Routing: I’m not smart enough for a SPA

I came across this via Anselm Hannemann’s Web Development Reading List. The author, Taylor Hunt, goes into a lot of detail about why they chose a traditional website over a Single Page Application (SPA), for a recent project.

There are a lot of accessibility concerns to consider when building an SPA, including:

• Restoring scroll positions between navigations
• Focussing on the last-used element when going ‘back’
• Focussing on an appropriate element when going ‘forward’
• And all the other client-side gubbins: back/forward history buttons, double-clicks, timeouts, ‘CMD + Click’, etc…

But the bit that struck me the most was this guideline from the article. We should favour:

• Security even over accessibility (“downgrading HTTPS ciphers for old browsers isn’t worth letting credit cards be stolen”)
• Accessibility even over speed (“a fast site for only the able creates inequality, but a slower site for everyone creates equality”).
• Speed even over slickness (deliver a fast site rather than an unnecessarily fancy one).

The battle of security vs accessibility was something that struck me in my article, I Used The Web For A Day On Internet Explorer 8, where I was faced with the dilemma that certain sites forced TLS 1.1, and my browser was only capable of TLS 1.0. The sites’ security policies made them inaccessible to me, but I had to concede that this was probably the right call.

Cabinet Office signs £400k deal for digital accessibility audits

To audit the accessibility of its digital services, the Cabinet Office has signed a two year deal with Digital Accessibility Centre (DAC) – a non-profit organisation based in Wales.

Adding context to the deal, which Civil Service World values at £436,632, the article states: “Research conducted over the past two years, and published by the CDDO in January, found that about 99% of public sector websites contained accessibility issues representing a potential problem for users with physical or cognitive impairments – as well as a possible breach of the new regulatory requirements.”

Side note: DAC are not to be confused with Deque (pronounced “dee queue”), a leading accessibility organisation that also does accessibility audits. Not knowing how the latter was pronounced, I must admit I mixed up the two when I heard colleagues talking about their accessibility audits, and only recently clarified it in a work chat!

---

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.

Your weekly frequent11y newsletter, brought to you by @ChrisBAshton:

US Accessibility Lawsuits

There have been a number of accessibility related lawsuits in America of late. As ever, I’ll try my best to summarise, but bear in mind I am no legal expert.

On Reconsideration, Judge Albright Transfers AudioEye, Inc. v. accessiBe Ltd. In December 2020, AudioEye accused accessiBe of infringing 9 patents, as well as committing false advertisement. The lawsuit has dragged on since then on the basis of where the case should be heard. It was originally filed in the Western District of Texas (WDTX), but accessiBe requested that it is heard in New York (WDNY) instead. After initially declining, the Judge has now agreed to transfer the case to WDNY; the article goes into details on why.

As Refining harm in Web Accessibility cases: Harty v. West Point Realty describes, New York is the most popular district court to process ADA web accessibility cases. In this West Point Realty case, the plaintiff attempted to visit the hotel’s website but “couldn’t discern from the room description whether the accessibility features in the hotel room meet his needs”. This allegedly violates the Department of Justice’s 2010 ADA regulations that require hotels to “identify and describe accessible features in the hotels and guest rooms offered through its reservation service“.

However, in such cases, the plaintiff must demonstrate that the violation brought them harm, something author Ken Nakata summarises as the “no harm, no foul” rule. It’s clear that the plaintiff would suffer a real harm should they book the hotel room believing that it is accessible, and then can’t navigate their wheelchair into the bathroom. But Ken doesn’t believe this lawsuit will succeed on the basis of “emotional injury” alone.

The final case I’d like to look at – also centred in New York – is Early Win for Deaf Plaintiff in VR Captioning Lawsuit. In 2020, Dylan Panarra, who is deaf, filed a lawsuit against the HTC corporation, arguing that they violated the ADA for failing to include captioning in their virtual reality content (housed on their subscription service “Viveort Infinity”). The case is still ongoing, and is the first known case about virtual reality captioning, so is an important one to keep an eye on.

24×24 pixel cursor bookmarklet

Adrian Roselli shares a JavaScript bookmarklet which turns your cursor into a 24 by 24 pixel square.

It is designed to test the new Understanding Success Criterion 2.5.8: Target Size (Minimum), which will be introduced in WCAG 2.2 (currently draft). The criterion specifies that “the target offset is at least 24 CSS pixels to every adjacent target”, to “help ensure targets can be easily activated without accidentally activating an adjacent target”.

Adrian adds a disclaimer that, as this is a new SC, it is still in flux and may not even be a square when done. Follow the GitHub discussions for updates.

Google: Accessibility Not A Direct Ranking Factor

This is a short article that’s well worth a quick read. Google’s Search Advocate John Mueller says, in an office-hours hangout recorded on March 25th, that accessibility plays no part in Google search ranking. In other words, an accessible site is no more likely to be ranked higher in search results than a less accessible one.

The underlying reason for this is measurability: no automated tools can give a true evaluation of accessibility, though there are things like Google’s own Core Web Vitals which provide some automated ways of measuring accessibility.

Google already considers the mobile-friendliness of a site in the search ranking, which helped encourage companies across the world to invest in responsive. It feels like there’s a real opportunity here to make businesses value accessibility more by making it a search ranking factor. But for now at least, this isn’t on Google’s roadmap.

---

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.

Your weekly frequent11y newsletter, brought to you by @ChrisBAshton:

Can the internet be made accessible for all?

This is a video clip (5m28s) from the BBC’s Dragon’s Den. Rene and Andy Perkins have founded a company, CityMaaS, aimed at improving accessibility on the web. They’ve created a product, Assist Me, which they hope to see companies embed on their websites (at a subscription fee of £30 to £45 per month). Assist Me is a button that triggers a popup menu where the user can adjust font size, turn on a screen reader, etc. In other words, this is an accessibility overlay.

The investors didn’t probe into why accessibility overlays are bad, but did express that this sort of assistive technology should exist on the user’s machine so that it can be used on any website. The founders’ response was that this puts the onus (and expense) on the user, and is therefore wrong.

The company has a couple of other products but they didn’t get much airtime. The Mobility Map looked promising – a way of seeing the accessibility information of any public place. But it’s behind a paywall, which is disappointing, as I really think there’s a gap in the market for making it easier to find accessible housing.

None of their products look any good to me, but I do applaud any opportunity to raise awareness of digital accessibility issues on prime time TV.

Braille Scanner iOS app

Developer Aaron Stephenson has developed a free ‘Braille Scanner’ app for iOS, which allows you to take a picture of a paper Braille document, and it will convert it to text, using a combination of image processing and machine learning. It supports Unified English Braille grade 1 and does not currently read other types of Braille.

One use case would be for people who are learning Braille and want to double-check what they’ve written. Watch a video demonstrating how Braille Scanner works on Twitter.

Free events at AbilityNet

Kelly from the charity AbilityNet got in touch with me to let me know about some free events that might be of interest to frequent11y readers.

Training on Wednesday 4th May (10am BST): How to build a disability inclusive workplace. “Discover where your organisation currently sits on our disability inclusion gap analysis scale overall and at each stage in the employee lifecycle”.

The “inert” attribute is finally coming to the web

Stefan Judis writes about the HTML inert attribute. When applied to a container, it renders all children inaccessible, i.e. you can no longer tab to or interact with any form elements within.

This will be super useful for properly implenting modal windows, such as a confirmation dialog asking if you’re sure you want to delete your account. With inert, you can ensure the user can’t tab away from the modal and continue to navigate around the page.

Browser support has been very poor, but that’s about to change. Stefan summarises:

Now, Safari Tech Preview ships it with v143, Chrome will enable the attribute with Chrome 102 in May and Firefox implements the feature behind the html5.inert.enabled flag.

PS: Stefan writes a fantastic weekly newsletter about web development – I suggest checking it out!

---

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.

Your weekly frequent11y newsletter, brought to you by @ChrisBAshton:

GOV.UK fixes a noisy screenreader issue

GOV.UK had discovered that in recent versions of screen readers, its contact form was too aggressive in announcing how many characters were remaining. This was despite the existing markup of aria-live="polite".

I’ve been keeping an eye on the GitHub issue for this, and a fix was merged recently. There are now three elements responsible for character count announcements:

1. A static element: “You can use up to 200 characters”. This is visible for non-JavaScript users, and visually hidden otherwise.
2. An injected, live-updating element showing the characters remaining. This has aria-hidden="true" to hide itself from screen readers.
3. An injected, debounced element showing characters remaining, visually hidden and aria-live="polite". It only updates after 1 second of inactivity, and only announces once the user has passed the threshold (if a threshold has been set).

This looked like quite a thorny issue to resolve – well done to the Design System team for getting it updated! I hope to see an official blog post on it soon 🤞

Interesting WebAIM threads

WebAIM (“Web Accessibility In Mind”) is a non-profit organization based at Utah State University, and is most famous for its annual accessibility analysis of the top million websites.

It also has an email discussion list, whereby anyone with an accessibility question can start a thread asking for advice. These next threads landed in my inbox recently, and looked pretty interesting:

First, Links within image captions. Jo wanted to check whether having links inside <figcaption> was an accessibility fail. The consensus seemed to be that it was OK.

Next, Links that open new windows and/or go off site: “do they need to have an icon or additional text?”. There was initially consensus that the absence of these would not be a WCAG fail, but on further sleuthing, the conclusion was that it would in fact violate SC 3.2.2 .

Finally, Accessibility a external content, in which Christopher wonders if there’s a material difference between linking to, and embedding, inaccessible content. The motivation for the question was that if people knew they needed to wrap captions around an embedded video that lacks them, but didn’t need to if simply linking off to the video, then people might decide to only use linking from now on. It led to an interesting discussion, but nothing conclusive.

Introduction to Web Accessibility course

Quick shout-out to edx.org, which is offering a free “Introduction to Web Accessibility” course. It takes an estimated 4-5 hours per week, for 4 weeks, to complete the course, but you can go at your own pace.

It covers WCAG, POUR, finding W3C resources, and how you can check pages for issues.

---

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.

Your weekly frequent11y newsletter, brought to you by @ChrisBAshton:

Guidance on Web Accessibility and the ADA

The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) has issued the above guidance on Web Accessibility and the ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act). This has prompted a number of articles, I’ve covered a couple of them here.

“Justice Department Breaks its Silence Regarding Website Accessibility” describes how the guidance explains at a high level how state/local governments (Title II), and “places of public accommodation” (Title III), can make their websites accessible. It “confirms the DOJ’s view that the websites of places of public accommodation must be accessible”, but does not make clear whether the ADA applies to the websites of online-only businesses.

In “Why we should be disappointed by DOJ’s web accessibility guidance“, Ken Nakata provides some useful history. Ken worked at DOJ, writing “the Department’s last technical assistance piece for web accessibility” in 2003, and leaving in 2004, mistakenly thinking DOJ would continue to make digital accessibility a priority.

DOJ “announced plans for developing new regulations” back in 2010, but scrapped that in 2017 after a few false starts. The inaction left opportunities wide open for plaintiffs to litigate against inaccessible sites, and “2021 was another record-breaking year in web accessibility litigation”.

Ken’s issue with the latest guidance is that it makes “exactly the same recommendations that DOJ made 19 years earlier”. The requirements are too “abstract”. The guidance provides links to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), but does not specify which version should be conformed to, if any. Ken wants the guidance to be clearer, and suggests that they require that sites conform to WCAG 2.1 A/AA. Ken cites governments and universities around the world that use this as a basis.

I’m not US-based, so have only skimmed through the guidance. It links out to several court cases regarding digital accessibility, covering both Title II and Title III, which looks like a useful reference to bookmark. More interesting is the accessibility resources section; particularly the 18F Accessibility Guide and Accessibility at digital.gov, which links to the U.S. Web Design System.

a11yphant: “Learning web accessibility made easy”

I haven’t tried this, so can’t vouch for how good it is, but have come across it in a few a11y newsletters of late. Worth checking out:

a11yphant teaches web accessibility, one step at a time, broken down into manageable pieces. We call these challenges. You won’t need to read large amounts of text to complete those. Instead, you will learn by applying the concepts in code. Get started with your first web accessibility challenge and improve your skills.

There are currently only four ‘challenges’ (valid HTML document, headings, content elements and page regions). The current ones are all classed as ‘easy’; there are no ‘medium’ or ‘hard’ challenges yet. Hopefully more will be released soon.

WCAG, but in language I can understand

Designer/developer Martin Underhill has written “a single article summing up each success criterion (SC) in WCAG 2.1 in as close to a single paragraph as [he] can manage”, because the guidelines themselves are not the easiest read. He leads with a disclaimer that this is not aimed at any audience other than himself, and obviously for brevity a lot of SC exceptions are missing.

It’s a really useful overview – here are some examples:

• 1.1.1 Non-text Content
  • Images should have descriptive (alt) text.
• 1.3.2 Meaningful Sequence
  • The visual presentation of the content matches what’s read out by a screen reader.
• 2.1.2 No Keyboard Trap
  • There shouldn’t be a situation where you enter a modal with the keyboard and can’t get back to where you were.

Alongside digitala11y.com, which does a similar thing but breaking each SC down into its own short article, there are now plenty of ‘simplified explanations’ of WCAG to refer to.

---

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.

This week is a resources special, covering tools, training and libraries that have landed in my inbox recently!

Web Accessibility by Google

This is a free Udacity course, aimed at giving “advanced” skills to developers over a span of approximately 2 weeks. It covers developing for screen readers, semantic markup, and managing focus, with material by industry heavyweights such as Rob Dodson.

This course relates to an optional (paid) “Nanodegree program” that gives you a certification in being a “Front End Web Developer”.

Usability Testing with People with Disabilities

Knowbility.org – a nonprofit org based in Texas, serving globally – has an “AccessWorks database” of hundreds of people with disabilities including blindness, deafness, mobility impairments and cognitive disabilities.

You can hire these volunteers to help with usability testing your website. Knowbility works as the go-between, negotiating the quote with the business, educational institution, government agency, or nonprofit.

I have no experience of working with them, so can’t vouch for how well it works, but I like the idea; anything that makes recruiting real users easier seems like a good thing. It looks like the users get paid at least $75 per test.

Designing accessible services

This guidance by the UK Home Office covers best design practices for supporting users with a variety of disabilities, including anxiety, autism, deafness, dyslexia, low vision, mobility disabilities and blindness.

Each category is summarised in just a handful of key points, so it doesn’t take long to read them all.

The main thing I’d like to highlight are the PDF posters (1.2Mb), which cover the same information but in bright, clear visuals. These are well worth printing off and putting up around the office.

Highcharts for accessibility

Highcharts JS is a library for creating beautiful interactive charts. (Ex colleagues in BBC Visual Journalism, take note – I think you’ll like this!)

This accessibility focussed page showcases how a well-built Highcharts chart can be accessible. The first demo shows how you can dig out every piece of information using keyboard tabbing (not just mouse hovering).

The second demo shows screen reader support. If you just want a quick demonstration, there’s even a video showing how it works with screen readers (though the embed doesn’t seem to be working at time of writing, so I had to dig the YouTube URL out using developer tools).

I love the showcase of low-vision features, where things like bar charts have patterns on them rather than just colours, making charts accessible to colour-blind users.

There are even options for “sonification” – playing the chart back as sound which can be “highly effective for conveying trends” – as well as “tactile export” (which can be printed for low-vision users, using specialist hardware).

Age-positive image library launched to tackle negative stereotypes of later life

“The Centre for Ageing Better has launched a free library of positive and realistic images of people aged 50 and over.”

“The images, which depict older people in non-stereotypical ways, are available for download and free to use.”

The library is available here: https://ageingbetter.resourcespace.com/pages/home.php

This library launch follows a recent report “An old age problem?” which looked at depictions of later life across society. It found that stock image libraries often use unrealistically positive or negative depictions of people in later life, and recommended that in both words and pictures, the media should attempt to communicate a more diverse representation of what it means to be older without resorting to stereotype and caricature.

Another resource that may be useful is this suite of age-positive icons, also created by The Centre for Ageing Better.

---

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.

frequent11y returns, after my first trip back to the USA in almost 3 years!

Their bionic eyes are now obsolete and unsupported

A worrying look at retinal implants provided by Second Sight, which has been in financial difficulty and no longer supports the products.

In the early 2000’s, the company produced the Argus I implant, and a second generation Argus II later. The former has a 16 electrode array, and the latter a 60 electrode array, each capable of rendering one ‘pixel’. The electrodes “stimulate the eye in different patterns multiple times per second, creating flashes of light that correspond to a low resolution video feed”. It does not provide normal vision by any means, rather it allows users to “perceive shades of grey that appear and disappear as they move their heads”.

After the 4 hour surgical procedure, patients had mixed success. Whilst some patients struggled to see even basic patterns and shapes, others were able to visit the grocery store without the use of a cane, and even able to ski and shoot arrows.

But the company discontinued its retinal implant business in 2019 and nearly went out of business in 2020. After a public offering to raise money in June 2021, its stock price plunged, and in February 2022 the company announced a proposed merger with an early stage company called Nano Precision Medical.

It is now focussing on a brain implant called Orion, which would bypass the eye altogether and “directly stimulate the visual cortex”. This would in theory be applicable to a wider market.

But the early adopters who had retinal implants installed now face an uncertain future. With the implants no longer maintained, when they stop working, they cannot be fixed. Barbara Campbell was walking through a New York City subway station at rush-hour when her world suddenly went dark. Jeroen Perk’s video processing unit fell to the ground and shattered; he had to source a replacement from another patient who was no longer using their device.

The implants can have medical complications too, such as interfering with MRIs. Whilst 83% of patients “experienced no serious events after two years”, some required surgery for hemorrhages, low eye pressure and detached retinas.

As a developer myself, I’m all too used to apps, libraries, frameworks and even hardware becoming obsolete. But the industry needs to have a serious think about how it can ensure longevity for patients of such invasive and life-changing technology.

Wordle has a colour-blind mode: Here’s how to activate it

Did you know that the viral online game Wordle has a mode aimed at colour-blind users? To activate it, go to the settings dial and enable the “high contrast mode” toggle.

The setting changes the colours of guessed letters from red and green, to blue and orange. It also changes the colour of the boxes that are shared to social media when you share your result.

Switching to this mode doesn’t impact the game at all, but will make it easier for your colour-blind friends/followers to engage with your shared scores. Consider switching to the high contrast mode today!

Carousels: No one likes you

Joni Halabi gives a breakdown of why carousels are terrible, and why website owners must stop asking developers to build them.

The points are pretty conclusive. For one, apparently just 1% of users interact with carousels, and of that tiny percentage, the overwhelming majority simply click on the first slide. Why build something hardly anyone is going to use?

But more importantly, carousels are really, really hard to make accessible. Auto-rotating carousels, particularly, are a no-go, with all sorts of usability issues such as not allowing the user time to read the contents of each slide, or having the user accidentally click on the wrong slide because they clicked mid-animation.

Movement such as this needs a pause button, by the way – would a non visual user be able to navigate to the button? How about to the previous/next buttons? Would they even know those buttons exist? Can a keyboard-only user easily go back and forth between the directional buttons?

Joni concludes with a request: to think about the content of your page, and only highlight the important stuff. She also links to https://shouldiuseacarousel.com/ as another resource worth reading.

---

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.

Your (almost) weekly frequent11y newsletter, brought to you by @ChrisBAshton. Advance warning: I’m on holiday next week, so the next edition will appear on Friday 25th March!

Giving a damn about accessibility

A useful resource for advocates, created by accessibility professional Sheri Byrne-Haber in partnership with UX Collective.

The handbook (PDF – 13.3 MB) is beautifully illustrated throughout its 49 pages, and covers the different ‘people challenges’ you will face as an accessibility advocate, and how to overcome them:

• People who are allergic to change. There’s little you can do about these.
• People who want to see the “business case” for accessibility. Their request is irrelevant: people with disabilities should not need to produce a business case to get an organisation to do the right thing.
• People who want to see detailed proof for every accessibility recommendation. Your first step should be to prove that WCAG applies to the inaccessible product.
• People who prioritise the creation of inaccessible new features over making old features accessible. Classic example: the Twitter ‘audio tweet’ “fiasco” (which I covered in dai11y 28/08/2020).
• People who believe “it only impacts a small number of users”. Sheri equates this attitude to “the moral equivalent of pickpocketing”: supporting an environment where inaccessible tools are generated.
• People who don’t believe that disabled people are part of the target demographic of their product. This is a “circular logical fallacy” as if people are excluded from using your product, they’ll never start to become your customer.
• People who brought you accessibility overlays. I’ve covered overlays a fair bit already.

The second half of the handbook is more broad. I’ve picked out some highlights:

“[Organisations should] reward employees for releasing accessible software, not just making their deadlines with whatever they hurl over the fence”.

“Perfectionism is a bad approach to accessibility”. Every moment you wait for ‘perfect’ increases the length of time people have to continue using an inaccessible product. “Your first attempt at making anything accessible will be awful – but even awful is better than 98% of what other people are doing”.

Accessibility is not a ‘project’: it requires ongoing commitment, best done in a continuous process improvement feedback loop.

Sheri praises design systems for building in accessibility that spreads throughout the software. And she recommends implementing an accessibility ‘release gate’, which sets the expectation from the beginning that only accessible software will be released.

“Good accessibility professionals speak at accessibility events. Great accessibility professionals speak at design events”. Talk accessibility at an a11y event and you’re preaching to the choir; talk accessibility at a design event and you’re preaching to a lot of “non-believers”.

This was a quick skim, but the whole handbook is worth a read, and doesn’t take as long as you’d think!

Overlay Position and Recommendations

The International Association of Accessibility Professionals (IAAP) has published a statement outlining its position on controversial accessibility overlay widgets/plugins. This can be referred to as an authoritative position on the subject, alongside other community efforts such as https://overlayfactsheet.com.

It is a short statement, so worth reading fully in its own right. But here are a couple of highlights:

[IAAP acknowledges] “the deceptive nature of marketing claims that a single addition of a line of code… provides full compliance with web accessibility standards, mandates, regulations, or laws currently.”

However, it is noticeably more open to the technology than other resources I’ve read. For example:

“IAAP recognizes the importance of automating functions related to accessibility and that artificial intelligence (AI) and other emerging technologies have great potential in improving accessibility. IAAP calls upon Overlay providers to engage with advocacy groups and the broader accessibility community to ensure that Overlays are developed and implemented in a way that improves access to websites and applications.”

Place Your Bets: How Accessible Is PokerStars VR?

Accessibility advocates from Equal Entry rated the accessibility of the popular VR game PokerStars VR. The article highlights a couple of articles written by the participants in this area, covering 360 video audio descriptions (which I covered in dai11y 01/01/2021) and VR from a deaf person’s perspective.

The group recall being immediately dropped into a public space, without any training, and being a bit overwhelmed by being approached by strangers before they’d had a chance to orient themselves.

One of the group, Meryl, is deaf, and had to pull her goggles up to check the Google Meet captions and chat box. In doing so, she kept accidentally turning off her goggles.

Holding cards, and picking up poker chips, was difficult, even with full mobile dexterity.

It’s not all bad news though: when testing the game in greyscale, the team noted that the poker chips had their value in text, and card suits have different symbols, so the game doesn’t rely on colour alone to denote information. It did note that the hearts and clubs are in the same shade, however, and would perhaps benefit from two different shades.

The group concluded with some recommendations for PokerStars VR. The game needs:

1. Addition of subtitles
2. Ability to change size and contrast of text
3. More use of haptic, alongside visual/audio feedback
4. Controller remapping
5. Display settings (e.g. brightness, contrast)
6. Several improvements to controlling movement/locomotion/rotation

Are we live?

Scott O’Hara dives deep into ARIA live in this technical post, detailing all the different ways of implementing a live region that inform screen readers that something has updated:

1. You can use specific ARIA region roles: alert, log or status
2. You can use aria-live, with one of the following states: assertive, polite, off
3. You can use HTML’s native output element, which has an implicit ARIA role of status

A common use case is the ‘notification’ design pattern whereby a message appears at the top of the screen. Developers often inject this notification into the page on an as-needed basis, but this doesn’t work very well for screen readers other than VoiceOver. The best approach is to ensure an empty live region exists on the page from the beginning, and then inject notification text into it.

The ARIA working group are apparently reviewing and planning to make big updates to live regions in ARIA 1.4. This is still a way off, as ARIA 1.2 is still only a W3C Candidate Recommendation Draft.

---

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.

After a couple of weeks off, your regular installment of frequent11y returns!

Why Don’t Developers Take Accessibility Seriously?

Melanie Sumner writes an engaging CSS Tricks article, exploring different perspectives on web accessibility in 3 ‘acts’:

1. Melanie laments how the accusatory tone of some accessibility advocates doesn’t help. Developers have a lot to learn in their careers beyond just HTML/JS/CSS. In the absence of good accessibility from educational resources, frameworks and tooling, it’s no wonder that the output isn’t perfect. Implying that devs are deliberately excluding people, or are crap at their jobs, is only going to make them defensive.
2. But for users who need better accessibility in order to navigate the web, the frustration “can boil over”. It can feel to them like they don’t matter, and the only way of getting heard is to demand the treatment afforded to them in law. Melanie says this can lead to a negative feedback cycle; some tech folks may opt out of listening because of the “rude” way it is delivered to them, and others may become overwhelmed as they begin to recognise the responsibility on their shoulders.
3. The final act concerns a designer who feels ‘restricted’ by accessibility. They want to use certain colours, knowing it doesn’t pass colour contrast guidelines. “Please consider this: you’re not designing for yourself. This is not like physical art. It’s a false choice to think that a design can either be beautiful or accessible.”

Melanie concludes by asking us to approach our work, and the people around us, with compassion and curiosity. Don’t try to fix the past, but be resolute going forward: make sure the code samples you write in your next documentation are accessible; include accessible annotations in your next design; include an accessibility talk in your next conference.

EU Runs World’s Largest Accessibility Test

A Deque article that is well worth a read. The EU Web Accessibility Directive (issued in October 2016) stipulated that all government agencies in the EU were required to ensure their websites and apps are accessible by June 2021.

Every country has to monitor the accessibility of its digital assets annually and report its findings to the EU every three years. December 23rd, 2021 was the end of the first reporting period. This article looks at those reports and picks out some highlights; I’ve pasted some key paragraphs below:

“Having a fully accessible website is sort of like having a dust-free house. If you work hard at it, it is something you might achieve, but keeping it that way is almost impossible. The real question is how common and how substantial the accessibility problems are. This is difficult to say, as there is no standard way to measure this. Unfortunately, this means that in the next report, it will be difficult to judge if web accessibility in those countries improved over time.”

“Kudos to the countries that did attempt to quantify their findings. We can’t make direct comparisons between countries because they don’t use the same metrics, [but] three years from now we will be able to see to what extent accessibility has improved. One example is www.toegankelijkheidsverklaring.nl, a register of Dutch Government websites, ranked A to E.”

“The European standard EN 301 549 (v2.1.2) includes a good number of accessibility requirements that are not part of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). For example, section 11.7 requires apps to support user preferences configurable through the operating system. It is therefore notable that more than half of the countries did not consider the additional EN requirements in their monitoring efforts.”

“All 27 EU members conducted research. The United Kingdom produced a report as well, though there was no formal obligation to the EU. The UK ceased to be a member state of the European Union on the 31st of January 2020. What we loved was how the UK communicated their results and retested the sites 3 months later to see how much they had progressed. This showed that sharing these results greatly improved these sites.”

“[This] is a great step forward for establishing digital accessibility as a standard across Europe. As always, there is room for improvement. The need for standard metrics in accessibility, for example, is a common limitation of the current standards, which the upcoming WCAG 3.0 may address. The next reporting period for the EU ends in December 2024, although we hope monitoring agencies will consider publishing preliminary results annually.”

Be the change you want to see in the world

This isn’t an article, but I just wanted to share a story from frequent11y subscriber Nick, who recently contacted me by email.

Nick noticed that common electrical items such as extension cords and adapters, sold for consumer use, have important safety information embossed on the items themselves. Despite being in all-capitals, the text can be hard to read, as the text is not coloured – only raised – and is written in small type.

The safety information is certified by a certifying organisation such as Underwriters Laboratories (UL). Nick reached out to UL to ask them to consider making it mandatory in their certification standards that contrast be sufficient across all kinds of products. For an analogy, he cited an IT standard and described how to determine contrast between two colors. He received a response promising to forward his request to the relevant people.

I think this serves as an important reminder that there is always more that can be done to improve accessibility, and sometimes all it takes is an email to invite change.

Next-generation spinal implants help people with severe paralysis walk, cycle, and swim

“Three men paralyzed in motorcycle accidents have become the first success stories for a new spinal stimulation device that could enable faster and easier recoveries than its predecessors.”

“The men, who had no sensation or control over their legs, were able to take supported steps within 1 day of turning on the electrical stimulation, and could stroll outside with a walker after a few months, researchers report today.”

“The nerve-stimulating device doesn’t cure spinal cord injury, and it likely won’t eliminate wheelchair use, but it raises hopes that the assistive technology is practical enough for widespread use.”

“For now, sending commands to the device is cumbersome. Users must select their desired movement on a tablet, which sends Bluetooth commands to a transmitter worn around the waist. That device must be positioned next to a “pulse generator” implanted in the abdomen, which then activates electrodes along the spine. Setting up to use the stimulation takes 5 to 10 minutes. But the next generation of devices should allow users to activate the pulse generator by giving voice commands to a smartwatch.”

The article goes into detail about how this device differs from previous spinal cord stimulators, and a bit about the history of such devices, which have their roots in the 1980s and were originally intended to treat chronic pain.

---

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.