Today is the International Day of People with Disabilities. This is an occasion “to educate the public on issues of concern, to mobilize political will and resources to address global problems, and to celebrate and reinforce achievements of humanity.” It’s also a good opportunity to remind teams in the UK public sector of their responsibility to make sites conform to WCAG 2.1 by September 2020.

This article about the most common WCAG violations seems an appropriate choice today:

We Analyzed 10,000,000 Pages and Here’s Where Most Fail with ADA and WCAG 2.1 Compliance

• Article by accessiBe, analysing mostly small US websites. They used automated tooling with AI to avoid false positives, e.g. avoid failing a non-compliant form if it’s never actually in view. 98% of sites failed WCAG 2.1 AA compliance with their menus alone (there are quite stringent requirements around using ESC and arrow keys to navigate the menu, which requires JavaScript rather than just good HTML markup). The next big fail was popups (89%), where most have no accessibility built in whatsoever, breaking the experience for keyboard users. 83% failed on buttons, mostly for not using <button> or role="button" markup. 76% failed on icons (often social media icons with no off-screen text). 71% failed on forms; most that passed were from ready-made systems such as Shopify.

Prefer longer newsletters? You can subscribe to week11y, fortnight11y or even 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.