Accessibility inception: sharing your knowledge (video, 46m) This is a Mischa Andrews talk from #ID24 in November 2017. I’ve had it in my bookmarks for a while, and am so pleased I’ve finally managed to watch it. Mischa talks openly and candidly about how you can effect accessibility change in your organisation, whilst overcoming the… [Read More]

Easy read is hard to get right This is a GOV.UK blog from the Inclusive Design team at UK Health Security Agency. It is about the “easy read” format – something I’d never actually come across before. The format, intended for people with learning difficulties, has a very specific template and definition: wide margins images… [Read More]

Myths about Web Accessibility This got shared around the work chat recently. A blog post by Álvaro Montoro that busts 10 myths about accessibility: Accessibility is difficult – “Accessibility is not difficult. Do you know what’s difficult? Running at an Olympic level. A Web Developer can learn at least the basics of Web Accessibility within… [Read More]

Twitter thread about “presentational list heuristics” by James Craig. The whole thing is worth a read, but here are the highlights: There used to be a problem with too many lists for assistive tech users: “all I hear when reading news sites is ‘list, two items … end of list, list 4 items…’ and I… [Read More]

Surface Adaptive Kit makes Microsoft’s laptops more accessible Microsoft is creating a “Surface Adaptive Kit” for its range of laptops/tablets, to better accommodate people with disabilities. The kit includes “keycap labels, bump labels, port indicators and device openers”. For example, a device opener includes a pull tab and ring, to make it easier to open… [Read More]

Axe-core vs PA11Y: Which one should you choose? GitLab now offers Pa11y as part of its CI pipeline, with no configuration needed. Craig Abbott compares it to axe-core, which is used by Deque for its acceptance tests. Out of 142 issues tested: axe-core found 39 issues in total, or 27%. 36 were violations and 3… [Read More]

Don’t Believe the Type! (video, 50m) I discovered this axe-con 2021 video via Richard Morton’s tweet. I thought it would be good to follow-up on the piece I wrote about the Hyperlegible font. The presentation, by Gareth Ford Williams, David Bailey and Bruno Maag, talks through the data they’ve gathered from around 7,000 hours of… [Read More]

This frequent11y issue is a Twitter special! I’ve already recently written about how Twitter’s new design has been giving users headaches. But there have been a flurry of other articles about Twitter, so I thought I’d round them up for you. What’s Really Wrong With the New Twitter Font An interview with Frederick Brennan, who… [Read More]

Hello! After a week off work, your weekly frequent11y newsletter returns… How to use the Accessibility Checker in Microsoft Office Perhaps obvious if you know how, but as someone who has used Office tools a fair bit over the years, I don’t think I’d ever known about the Accessibility Checker! To use in Microsoft Word,… [Read More]

‘May be an image’: What it’s like browsing Instagram while blind Kait Sanchez writes about the experience of screen reader users on social media. The auto generated alt text for photos on Instagram and other sites is often poor: “two brown cats lying on a textured surface” turned out to be a woman in a… [Read More]