Your daily frequent11y newsletter, brought to you by @ChrisBAshton:
- Over 400 accessibility advocates and developers have signed an open letter calling on the industry to avoid using controversial “accessibility overlay products”, the most famous of which is accessiBe. These ‘widgets’ you can install on your website often claim to make your site WCAG compliant, by pulling in third party scripts to ‘fix’ problems such as missing alt text.
- The document lists first-hand accounts from people with disabilities struggling to use websites that have implemented overlays.
- It also describes the privacy issues of such overlays, which detect when assistive technology is running on the device, exposing the fact that the end user has a disability, with no option for them to choose whether or not to disclose it themselves.
- The document recommends that people fix the underlying accessibility issues at source, and abandon use of quick fixes such as these, as they are not effective.
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