week11y issue 112

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

Guidance on Web Accessibility and the ADA

The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) has issued the above guidance on Web Accessibility and the ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act). This has prompted a number of articles, I’ve covered a couple of them here.

Justice Department Breaks its Silence Regarding Website Accessibility” describes how the guidance explains at a high level how state/local governments (Title II), and “places of public accommodation” (Title III), can make their websites accessible. It “confirms the DOJ’s view that the websites of places of public accommodation must be accessible”, but does not make clear whether the ADA applies to the websites of online-only businesses.

In “Why we should be disappointed by DOJ’s web accessibility guidance“, Ken Nakata provides some useful history. Ken worked at DOJ, writing “the Department’s last technical assistance piece for web accessibility” in 2003, and leaving in 2004, mistakenly thinking DOJ would continue to make digital accessibility a priority.

DOJ “announced plans for developing new regulations” back in 2010, but scrapped that in 2017 after a few false starts. The inaction left opportunities wide open for plaintiffs to litigate against inaccessible sites, and “2021 was another record-breaking year in web accessibility litigation”.

Ken’s issue with the latest guidance is that it makes “exactly the same recommendations that DOJ made 19 years earlier”. The requirements are too “abstract”. The guidance provides links to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), but does not specify which version should be conformed to, if any. Ken wants the guidance to be clearer, and suggests that they require that sites conform to WCAG 2.1 A/AA. Ken cites governments and universities around the world that use this as a basis.

I’m not US-based, so have only skimmed through the guidance. It links out to several court cases regarding digital accessibility, covering both Title II and Title III, which looks like a useful reference to bookmark. More interesting is the accessibility resources section; particularly the 18F Accessibility Guide and Accessibility at digital.gov, which links to the U.S. Web Design System.

a11yphant: “Learning web accessibility made easy”

I haven’t tried this, so can’t vouch for how good it is, but have come across it in a few a11y newsletters of late. Worth checking out:

a11yphant teaches web accessibility, one step at a time, broken down into manageable pieces. We call these challenges. You won’t need to read large amounts of text to complete those. Instead, you will learn by applying the concepts in code. Get started with your first web accessibility challenge and improve your skills.

There are currently only four ‘challenges’ (valid HTML document, headings, content elements and page regions). The current ones are all classed as ‘easy’; there are no ‘medium’ or ‘hard’ challenges yet. Hopefully more will be released soon.

WCAG, but in language I can understand

Designer/developer Martin Underhill has written “a single article summing up each success criterion (SC) in WCAG 2.1 in as close to a single paragraph as [he] can manage”, because the guidelines themselves are not the easiest read. He leads with a disclaimer that this is not aimed at any audience other than himself, and obviously for brevity a lot of SC exceptions are missing.

It’s a really useful overview – here are some examples:

  • 1.1.1 Non-text Content
    • Images should have descriptive (alt) text.
  • 1.3.2 Meaningful Sequence
    • The visual presentation of the content matches what’s read out by a screen reader.
  • 2.1.2 No Keyboard Trap
    • There shouldn’t be a situation where you enter a modal with the keyboard and can’t get back to where you were.

Alongside digitala11y.com, which does a similar thing but breaking each SC down into its own short article, there are now plenty of ‘simplified explanations’ of WCAG to refer to.


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