What makes writing more readable? A fantastic deep dive into how to write in ‘plain language’. The entire article is written in normal literary style, but every paragraph has a plain language equivalent adjacent to it, which you can toggle to switch to. The interactivity of this article is a joy to play with and… [Read More]

Sabbath mode and assistive technology features Eric Bailey writes about the “secret mode that comes with almost all large ovens, refrigerators, dishwashers, and other large kitchen appliances”. Sabbath mode (or Shabbat mode) helps people to comply with Halakha (a body of Jewish religious laws), which forbids Jews from doing “work that creates” on Shabbat (the… [Read More]

HTML gains a <search> element This one came up in the work chat. On 24th March, the “WhatWG HTML living standard” gained a new <search> element. It is intended to be used to contain a set of form controls “related to performing a search or filtering operation”. Example code snippet: Functionally, it is the equivalent… [Read More]

accessible forms needs and how to fix common errors This is a handy guide to forms, covering the basics you need to get right: Each of these is covered in more detail further on in the article. The most interesting section is the one on validation: The article ends with some examples and videos demonstrating… [Read More]

Screen Readers support for text level HTML semantics Steve Faulkner writes about accessibility support for HTML tags such as <strong> (and <b>), <em> (and <i>), and <del>, <ins> and <mark>. (He performed the same analysis 15 years ago – things have moved on a bit since then). For strong/emphasised text, there is no audible distinction… [Read More]

Twitter is getting rid of its free API tier. That’s a nightmare for accessibility activists. Twitter has announced that, starting February 9, they will no longer support free access to the Twitter API (both v1.1 and v2). This move has not been popular, including with myself – basic things like the automatic tweeting of my… [Read More]

This week is a Smashing Magazine special! It’s a great publication – which I’ve written for a few times – and I’ve had some of their a11y articles sitting in my bookmarks for a while. These articles are long and full of useful info, so it’s sure to be a bumper week. Let’s dive in!… [Read More]

Top 10 Accessibility News of 2022 This is a round-up of last year’s “most talked about” accessibility news stories, brought to you by Equal Entry (who also have a newsletter you should subscribe to!). I won’t regurgitate the whole list, which is quite US-centric, but there are some interesting items that were actually completely new… [Read More]

5 takeaways from screen reader usability interviews Frontend developer Jess Budd shares five things they’ve learned from user testing with screen reader users. Google’s ‘Guided Frame’ helps visually impaired users shoot better pictures This article has been in my bookmarks since the Pixel 7 launch event on October 6th, 2022. Google announced “a number of… [Read More]

EA shares more accessibility patents Electronic Arts – the games developer – unveiled its “accessibility patent pledge” in August 2021. Its purpose is to “create a collective” among games developers, to improve accessibility for disabled players. It originally shared 5 patents through the pledge: In late 2022 they added 6 more: Finally, EA has open-sourced Fonttik,… [Read More]