dai11y 09/04/2021

Your daily frequent11y newsletter, brought to you by @ChrisBAshton:

This one is another special two-parter, this time to do with accessible front-end components!

  • A Complete Guide To Accessible Front-End Components
    • A Smashing Magazine article that does a bit too much, in my opinion! It begins with a table of contents, listing common UI components but also media preferences such as dark mode and prefers-reduced-motion. Each anchor link jumps to the specific part of the article which either describes how to build it, or links to an article which describes how to build it, or links to a library that implements it well.
    • Then the components list comes to a quiet close and there’s a long section promoting different a11y resources and tools. I discovered a11ysupport.io, which describes which ARIA roles and HTML features are supported in popular combinations of browser and screen reader.
    • A useful resource, well worth a read, but I’m not entirely clear as to what it’s trying to be!
  • Accessible front-end components: claims vs reality
    • This article by Hidde de Vries references the first article, and warns that we must do our due diligence when using third-party components that claim to be “accessible”. Some “accessible” components may have good colour contrast but not work with just a keyboard, or may work fine when zoomed in but not be interactable with voice navigation. You should perform some basic checks on the component yourself.
    • Look for specifics in the claims – what WCAG standard do the maintainers claim their component conforms to? How was it tested (e.g. formal WCAG testing, checklists, or automated tests), and what kind of browser support does it have?
    • Check the GitHub issues on the project – particularly ones mentioning WCAG or accessibility – and read the maintainers’ responses.
    • Are the maintainers open about any caveats / planned fixes? See if the project has an accessibility statement.

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