Your daily frequent11y newsletter, brought to you by @ChrisBAshton:
Today’s dai11y is a two-article special – both written by Raghavendra Satish Peri:
- The Captcha Conundrum & Accessible Alternatives
- Raghavendra, a blind, accessibility specialist, talks through the problems they faced trying to create an account on Wikipedia. They were faced with a CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart). It was visual only, and had no audio alternative and no option to use a one-time confirmation code sent to email or phone.
- Some CAPTCHA solutions do provide an audio alternative, but this is inaccessible to deafblind users.
- In addition to email/phone options, you could also use the honeypot method, whereby a text field is added to the form but visually hidden. Bots will find the input and fill it with text, so you can avoid a lot of spam form submissions by filtering out all submissions that contain that input.
- Another inclusive option is a logical or mathematical test, e.g. “Is fire hot or cold?”, as bots will struggle with this. It can be confusing for some users to know how to respond, however.
- Google’s reCAPTCHA is apparently quite good, requiring only a box to be checked. However, it sometimes treats screenreader behaviour as bot behaviour.
- Raghavendra concludes “it’s always better to offer multiple options that work for multiple types of disabilities than just one or two”.
- Scroll to top: Where should the focus land?
- This is more of a placeholder than an article, in which Raghavendra asks us, the community, where the focus should land when activating a “scroll to top” link. What exactly is the ‘top’? It’s easy enough to visually scroll to the top of the page, but where should the keyboard focus go? We have three options:
- Move focus to the
<body>tag (a poor experience in NVDA, as nothing is announced). - Move focus to the “Skip to main content” link.
- Move focus to the
<h1>heading level one, or<main>region landmark.
- Move focus to the
- There is no definitive answer, but there are some interesting comments at the bottom. The community seems largely split on whether it should be 2 or 3.
- This is more of a placeholder than an article, in which Raghavendra asks us, the community, where the focus should land when activating a “scroll to top” link. What exactly is the ‘top’? It’s easy enough to visually scroll to the top of the page, but where should the keyboard focus go? We have three options:
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.
