week11y issue 105

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

Five 2022 accessibility trends

A UX Collective article outlining predicted trends for 2022:

  1. The web will become more accessible – particularly the websites of larger companies.
    • The SOAR report found that 62% of the Alexa 100 websites were accessible to screen readers, up from 40% in 2020.
    • The WebAIM Million project found a very slight improvement in the accessibility of homepages across the web (from 2020 to 2021), but it will take until “the 2070s or 2080s” at this rate for the entire web to be accessible.
  2. Digital accessibility lawsuits will continue to increase
    • More than 4000 accessibility lawsuits (based on the Americans with Disabilities Act) were filed in the USA in 2021.
    • The Hooters case found that companies can be sued even if they already have remediation efforts underway and if they’ve already entered into a settlement agreement with another party.
  3. We’ll see less usage of accessibility overlays
    • Over 200 overlay customers were sued in 2021 for lack of accessibility on their website.
    • There could well be counterclaims against overlay companies from these customers.
    • One overlay company, AudioEye, had a stock value of $42 in February 2021, but recently fell to less than $7.
  4. WCAG 2.2 will be the new standard most companies use to determine accessibility
    • The standard is expected to be finalised by the end of March 2022. WCAG 2.1 took just 4 months from being finalised to being referenced in its first settlement agreement; WCAG 2.2 is likely to follow a similar trend.
    • The article suggests that the most difficult of the new WCAG 2.2 criteria to implement will be SC 3.3.7: Accessible Authentication.
  5. Large companies will want to get a head start on WCAG 3.0

WordleBot is a shortcut that brings accessibility to your Wordle results

Unless you’ve been living under a rock in 2022, you’ll no doubt have come across Wordle, the viral word guessing game that has people sharing their results in a grid on social media, like so:

Screenshot of ChrisBAshton's tweet: "Wordle 214 3/6", followed by three rows of coloured squares.
I’m not just sharing this one because I got a fantastic score…

The resulting grid of coloured squares represents how many letters of each guess was correct, and ultimately how many guesses were needed before the correct word was arrived at. But it’s something of an accessibility nightmare for screen reader users.

Federico Viticci has attempted to fix the issue, by building WordleBot. This is a shortcut for iOS and macOS which edits the text in your clipboard to have a more accessible output, like so:

Wordle 207 5/6

⬜🟨🟨⬜⬜ (2 partial)
🟨🟨⬜⬜⬜ (2 partial)
⬜🟩🟨🟩⬜ (1 partial, 2 perfect)
⬜🟩⬜🟩🟩 (3 perfect)
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 (Wordle done on Line 5)β€” Federico Viticci (@viticci) January 12, 2022

It’s a nice idea, and a valiant effort by Federico, but is a manual workaround that only works for Apple customers. I’d like to see somebody build a Twitter bot that automatically responds to inaccessible Wordle tweets and provides alt text responses – or better yet, the creator of Wordle could change the share text directly.

PS: Wordle has inspired all sorts of creative endeavours, including a Wordle-to-music generator, Wordle-to-Townscaper and Wordle cross-stitching!

a11ymyths.com

(Accessibility Myths, shared by Smashing Magazine)

Sergei Kriger debunks 22 myths about accessibility on the web, such as accessibility only being for blind users. I’ve not heard of all of these myths, so some items were added just in keeping with the format, I think, but it’s worth a quick read nonetheless, and as prompted at the end of the page, you’re encouraged to “show this website to your manager”.

Also see its sister website, a11yfacts.com, for a list of statistics on disabilities (e.g. 15% of the world’s population has a disability) and how certain demographics use the web (e.g. 67.7% of screen reader users use headings for navigating).

Game Demos Need to Come Back For Many Reasons, Especially for Accessibility

Thought-provoking article by Ben Bayliss, describing how game demos were a great vehicle for testing a game’s accessibility before purchasing the game. Demos used to come on a disc bundled with PlayStation Official Magazine (and others), but in the digital era are increasingly hard to find.

Without demos, disabled gamers are forced to watch YouTube videos of other people reviewing the games, to figure out whether or not it will be accessible to them. “Major game outlets rarely touch on accessibility in our reviews or editorials that go live around launch”.

Some companies are beginning to make an effort in this area. “Ubisoft have been more proactive in inviting disabled content creators and journalists to events such as Ubisoft Forward, allowing them to spend time with the game and inform their audience specifically about accessibility”. It also “shares its efforts through blog posts and has a dedicated team“.

“Some studios such as SMG Studio and Team 17 released videos showing accessibility features available at launch. This is vital information to be sharing, but there’s a huge difference between a blog post or a short clip on accessibility features and how these actually feel in play. And that goes for both accessibility and the game as a whole in general.”


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