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

Myths about Web Accessibility

• This got shared around the work chat recently. A blog post by Álvaro Montoro that busts 10 myths about accessibility:
  • Accessibility is difficult – “Accessibility is not difficult. Do you know what’s difficult? Running at an Olympic level. A Web Developer can learn at least the basics of Web Accessibility within hours”.
  • Accessibility is expensive – “Something that they could have avoided if they had implemented accessibility at the start”.
  • Accessible websites are ugly – “Nothing could be further from the truth”.
  • Accessibility is for blind people/screen readers – “The people who require Web Accessibility are not a homogeneous group”.
  • Accessibility is for people with disabilities – “There are invisible and situation disabilities that impair people and limit what they can do temporarily (or even permanently)”.
  • Automatic tests are enough for accessibility – “automatic tests only detect ~30% of the issues.”.
  • Accessibility overlays are enough to ensure Web Accessibility – “The consensus in the Accessibility community is almost unanimous: overlays don’t work”.
  • HTML is accessible by default – “elements like <video> or <audio> have controls that are not fully keyboard-accessible and that differ considerably from browser to browser and cause frustration. ‘Mostly accessible’ looks much better.”
  • No ARIA > Bad ARIA – the equation should be “Good ARIA > No ARIA > Bad ARIA”. Otherwise we “perpetuate a false dichotomy. We can learn ARIA, practice ARIA, improve ARIA”.
  • Prefers reduced motion means no motion – “We don’t need to cancel every motion on a website. Instead, we need to think through them, check what’s appropriate and not”.

Have Single-Page Apps Ruined the Web? (video, 19m)

• Talk by Rich Harris, creator of Rollup and Svelte, for Jamstack Conf.
• He explains what a Single Page App (SPA) is, then starts off critical. “SPAs are terrible because”:
  • Bloated JS framework, complex tooling, poor performance.
  • It will be buggy. Expectations of the web are broken, e.g. CMD + Click should open links in new tabs, but often won’t work in SPAs.
  • Accessibility issues: focus management, scroll management, navigation announcements, etc.
  • Less resilience. Rich shares a webpage he often points people to when they assume that everyone has JavaScript. It is a long flowchart of all of the reasons why JS may not load for someone. Rich also points out that these users are underrepresented in analytics, because analytics typically require JS to run.
• But then he highlights the benefits:
  • SPAs allow you to do things you can’t do ‘natively’, e.g. transitions between pages.
  • Only need to load third party scripts once, whereas multi-page apps (i.e. the traditional server-rendered sites) have to at least evaluate the JS on each page load, even if the scripts themselves are already cached.
  • Single codebase of JS (rather than 1 for client, and 1 for server, which may be, for example, PHP).
• Rich proposes a new direction for the web, and coins the term “transitional apps” (from “transitional design” in the interior design industry), which are apps that take the best of both worlds. There is a lot happening in this space, including:
  • Hotwire
  • React Server Components
  • Marko partial hydration
  • qwik aggressive lazy loading
  • astro islands architecture
  • …and SvelteKit, which Rich gives an impressive demo on.

Stark, a hub for accessible software design, launches a Mac app in beta

• Stark is a suite of tools for the world’s most popular design apps. “Companies can upload their design files, which then identifies accessibility issues and suggests changes.”
• It “offers checks and suggestions to make sure that visual materials meet accessibility standards for visually impaired people”. More than 500,000 people have used Stark’s integrated plug-ins for apps like Adobe XD, Figma, Sketch and Google Chrome.
• Stark have now released Stark for Mac, a standalone app that works with Sketch and will soon work with Figma and Adobe XD. It allows you to detect accessibility issues at scale, rather than on a per-file basis as is the case with the plugins.
• Stark has a limited free plan, after which it costs $60 per year for the current suite of tools. The private beta version of Stark for Mac is currently free, with pricing yet to be announced.

Easy read is hard to get right

• This is a GOV.UK blog from the Inclusive Design team at UK Health Security Agency.
• It is about the “easy read” format – something I’d never actually come across before.
• The format, intended for people with learning difficulties, has a very specific template and definition:
  • wide margins
  • images on the left (to help convey meaning to the text on the right)
  • large text (14 to 16pt)
  • bigger spaces between lines (1.5 spacing)
  • 1 idea per image
• The nature of these requirements mean that ‘easy read’ content is often published as a PDF. This comes with its own accessibility issues, described in the article.
• The intended audience often has a ‘support person’ that they share this kind of content with, so it is important that they are easily able to print off the information and keep it together.
• Some users preferred text-only versions of the content, as they found the use and choice of images patronising.

Xbox reveals a huge new accessibility feature that puts Sony and Nintendo to shame

• A clickbait headline, no doubt, but an interesting announcement: Xbox are introducing a classification system to their stores (Xbox.com, PC, Game Pass), ‘tagging’ games with information related to their accessibility. This is to make it easier for disabled gamers to know whether a game supports their needs.
• “Testing of the feature is currently underway in the public Xbox Accessibility Insider League (XAIL) branch on all modern Xbox consoles. XAIL is free for all Xbox owners to join and is a group specifically designed for testing accessibility features in games and the Xbox operating system. It currently has around 60,000 enrolled members.”
• Microsoft has made this system quite strict. For example, for a game to be tagged as having accessible “subtitle options”, the game needs to do more than just ‘have subtitles’, as it must allow the subtitles to be customised and resizable to a minimum of 200% of their original size.

Accessibility overlays are a hot topic in the a11y world, so it’s worth keeping on top of all legal proceedings in this space. In her blog post below, accessibility consultant Julie Moynat writes a cautionary tale of how an accessibility overlay company have started legal proceedings against her, off the back of a single tweet.

Help for my lawyer’s fees in the FACIL’iti lawsuit against me

• In November 2020, the French Secretary of State to Digital Transition and Electronic Communications tweeted positively about the use of FACIL’iti to make sites accessible. (You can see the accessibility overlay in action on https://www.facil-iti.com/).
• Julie responded to the tweet, “expressing disapproval”. Her response ended up getting 9 retweets and 32 likes.
• At the end of December 2020, FACIL’iti sent a formal notice to Julie’s employer, demanding that the tweet be deleted. NB, Julie had tweeted from her personal account, outside of working hours.
• Julie deleted the tweet within two days of being informed of the letter, on 28th December.
• On 21st May 2021, a subpoena letter was served to Julie’s home address, intending to press charges to the tune of €10,500.
• Julie reached out for help via the blog post above, asking the community to donate to cover her legal fees. She raised almost €6,000, which has fulfilled her target.
• She updated her blog post on 12th October: the proceedings are still ongoing, and no trial date has yet been set.

Blaming Screen Readers 🚩×5

• There is, apparently, a trend going around on Twitter (example tweet): to state something that raises red flags for you, followed by a number of ‘red flag emojis’, i.e. “🚩”.
• Except that this isn’t a red flag emoji, other than by coincidence. It could just as easily have been yellow or green. What screen readers actually announce when they reach that emoji is “triangular flag on post”. So the meaning is lost on screen reader users.
• The great Adrian Roselli gives a detailed write-up of the problem – and plenty of places where it’s cropped up in the past – in this blog post. He’s heard a number of responses from people along the lines of “the screen reader is the problem”; Adrian argues otherwise, stating that screen readers don’t use natural language processing and do not ‘see what you see’. Nor can screen readers be updated overnight, to suddenly understand these short-lived trends and memes.
• The onus is on us to write our content in an accessible way. The blog post summary is frustratingly vague on answers: “Techniques to make your content accessible abound. They are no more than a quick search away should you care to try”, which doesn’t explain what you should do if you want to participate in a trend but the trend is inherently inaccessible. My personal recommendation would be to write an ‘alt text’ “reply” to your tweet, to clarify the original tweet for screen reader users.

And finally… a spooky-themed game for you, just in time for Halloween!

HOCUS :FOCUS – A keyboard accessibility horror game.

• A game that highlights issues caused by missing focus styles, unexpected tab orders, and so on.
• I completed the game in 1 minute and 16 seconds. Can you beat my time?

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