After a few days off work, your weekly frequent11y newsletter has been resumed! How anyone can make Maps more accessible Google relies on its community of Local Guides to update Google Maps information by, for example, inputting whether a restaurant has tables suitable for people who use wheelchairs. These guides share some actionable tips for… [Read More]

Shifting left: how introducing accessibility earlier helps the BBC’s design system Sophie Beaumont writes about working on the BBC’s design system. A team had hoped to re-use one of the existing components in a new feature they were building, because it matched their visual design. However, on closer inspection, the underlying HTML semantics were unsuitable… [Read More]

Should you use an <h1> in email code? A thorough investigation by Mark Robbins, looking at the state of webmail across a dozen different providers. 60% of screen reader users prefer pages containing just one <h1> with the document title, whereas 33.3% prefer two <h1> headings, for the site name and the title. Given a preference for… [Read More]

WebAIM Million – 2021 Update This is an annual report that uses the WAVE web accessibility testing tool to analyse the homepages of the top 1 million websites. Compared to last year: The number of detectable accessibility errors dropped from 60.9 to 51.4. The number of DOM elements in the page has increased from 864… [Read More]

Introducing Editoria11y: Accessibility Autocorrect The folks at Princeton University have released a tool, editoria11y, as a frontend module of JS and CSS (but also a Drupal module, and a WordPress plugin is in the works). The tool aims to catch only editorial accessibility errors, rather than the “ALL the errors” approach used by other accessibility… [Read More]

Clubhouse, the Shift to Spoken Social Media, and the Voices That Will Be Silenced Lawrence Weru discusses the Clubhouse app and what it is like as a person with a stutter. The invite-only app can gather over 1,000 people together in “rooms” for voice chats, where you can raise a ‘hand’ to ask to speak… [Read More]

Is your CAPTCHA keeping humans out? CAPTCHAs are important for preventing DDoS attacks, as they prevent botnets from accessing processor-intensive parts of websites such as login forms. But they can give false positives, where CAPTCHAs filter out humans, which is particularly bad in the COVID-19 era where it is essential to be able to access… [Read More]

Automated accessibility testing: Leveraging GitHub Actions and pa11y-ci with axe A blog post describing how to install pa11y-ci to your project and run it automatically with GitHub Actions. pa11y-ci is a Continuous Integration wrapper around pa11y, which is an automated accessibility tool that scans your web pages for issues. You can configure the WCAG standard… [Read More]

iPhones can now tell blind users where and how far away people are An article from October 2020, but it taught me something I didn’t know: iOS 14.2 allows you to detect whether there are people in view (using your camera), and how far away they are. iOS will say how far the person is… [Read More]

Building an Accessibility Library Stephanie Hagadorn, UX Design Lead at Indeed, writes about the creation of the “A11y Annotation Kit“. This is a Figma-based ‘accessibility library’, designed to improve the handover from designer to developer and prevent both roles from making the same old accessibility mistakes around things like colour contrast issues. See the screenshot… [Read More]