week11y issue 107

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

Shirt with magnetic buttons provides independence

I came across the above post on LinkedIn about a year ago; a video of a man called Lincoln, who has cerebral palsy, putting on a shirt unaided. The shirt looks like a standard button shirt, but uses magnets for fastening. The typically viral LinkedIn post was lacking in detail, so I did some Googling, and found the company that creates these shirts.

US-based MagnaReady was started by Maura Horton when her husband Don developed Parkinson’s Disease. When he started having difficulty fastening his shirt in 2009, Maura had the idea about using magnets, and eventually started the company. Watch the video (~5m) for the full story.

Sadly, Don passed away in 2016, but the company remains active and has a range of casual, athletic and sleepwear clothing for men and women.

The crisis is real: Where are the web accessibility professionals?

A WebAIM article with some real food for thought.

“The number of job listings with ‘accessibility’ in the title grew 78% in the year ending in July [2021] from the previous 12 months”. That’s on top of the 38% increase from the previous year. By 2027, the global accessibility testing market is poised to hit $606 million. Demand for accessibility professionals has never been higher.

But there’s relatively low take-up amongst newcomers to the industry. “WebAIM’s 2021 Survey of Web Accessibility Practitioners had a significantly higher level of respondents that were over the age of 45 (37.3%) than did the 2020 Stack Overflow survey of web professionals as a whole (8.9%).” The article suggests that the industry may reach chronic shortages when these individuals retire.

The article blames a lack of mandatory accessibility teaching in higher education, and calls for companies to pay accessibility professionals higher salaries to attract more people into this part of the industry.

Which accessibility settings do the Dutch really use on their phone?

I came across this article via a LinkedIn post by Gareth Ford Williams, which also summarises the article quite nicely.

This article looks at how over a million people use their phones in the Netherlands. 43% of users surveyed use at least one accessibility setting, the most common one being “adjust text size” (33%). Interestingly, of that 33%, 13% made the text smaller (meaning 20% made the text larger).

Only 1.27% of respondents have closed captions switched on by default, but as Gareth points out, this is likely because they’re more comfortable setting this feature on the app or website level. The figure is closer to 80% when looking at Netflix, Facebook and Twitter.

There are a whole host of other statistics about all sorts of accessibility features throughout, and reference to why such features might be enabled. This can include situational impairments (disabling “shake to undo” while on a rattling bus or train), educational (non-native speakers enabling captions while learning a new language), etc, as well as disabilities.

2021’s sample size of >1 million respondents is in stark contrast to the original study in 2020, which had just 268. The end of the article goes into detail about how it managed to achieve such high numbers this time around.


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