Your weekly± frequent11y newsletter, brought to you by @ChrisBAshton: ± ok… not quite weekly at the moment. I’ve recently started a new job, and also had a bit of annual leave, so I’m still figuring out what kind of cadence I can commit to for this newsletter! The five types of people who produce inaccessible… [Read More]

I Made a Site Leveraging AI: How Accessible Was It? Interesting experiment by Mark Steadman, who used Durable to generate a website. Using axe-core to scan the site, he found 17 accessibility issues, of which 11 were ‘critical’ and 6 ‘serious’. These included: Manually discovered a11y issues included keyboard focus indicators being highly inconsistent –… [Read More]

WebAIM Million Report 2023 In March, WebAIM published their annual accessibility report. A number of well-informed folks have read the report and written articles with their key takeaways. Manuel Matuzović picks up on one figure in his post, “50.1% empty links“. The number of websites containing links with no text (usually when linking an image… [Read More]

Don’t meddle with user input Martin Underhill warns against designs that manipulate user input, and the maxlength attribute in particular, which prevents users from typing anything beyond a certain character limit. Whilst these features are often implemented with the best of intentions – to assist the user in inputting data in the correct format, for… [Read More]

Everyone Watches TV with Subtitles Now. How’d That Happen? I thought this article was interesting to call out, as in my experience we still often assume captions should be an ‘opt in’ thing. But perhaps things have pivoted to them being ‘opt out’. Indeed, some captions are now ‘on’ by default on social media. In… [Read More]

My Thoughts on Accessibility of NFTs and Web3 Apologies if this is so last year (this post has been in my bookmarks since February 2022, and admittedly we haven’t heard much about Web3 since the rise of ChatGPT). But this article by Crystal Preston-Watson evaluates an emerging and hyped technology for its accessibility, so there’s certainly… [Read More]

Flexbox and the Screen Reader Experience A Webaim article that reminds us that whilst CSS flexbox can be used to change the visual order of content, it often has no bearing on how the content is consumed by a screen reader. This can lead to major accessibility issues if the intended reading order differs from… [Read More]

Face-off: Should kit colours be catered to colour-blind fans? Anyone who’s ever played FIFA on a game console will at some point have ended up playing a game where both sides have really similar looking kits. It becomes difficult to know who you can pass to, and makes the game less enjoyable. This is an… [Read More]

After a few weeks off, the frequent11y newsletter has returned! A Practical Approach to Automated Accessibility Mark Steadman writes a mini series on automated accessibility. In this introductory article, Mark introduces his three-step plan for introducing automated accessibility checks into your pipeline: There are a lot of different testing approaches and tools out there, so… [Read More]

It’s been a little while since my last week11y, partly because Mailchimp have recently upped their prices, meaning I’m no longer within the free tier. I’ve been procrastinating moving to a different provider, but will give that some more thought. I’ll also be on annual leave for a while now, so you won’t hear much… [Read More]