Your weekly frequent11y newsletter, brought to you by @ChrisBAshton:
GOV.UK fixes a noisy screenreader issue
GOV.UK had discovered that in recent versions of screen readers, its contact form was too aggressive in announcing how many characters were remaining. This was despite the existing markup of aria-live="polite".
I’ve been keeping an eye on the GitHub issue for this, and a fix was merged recently. There are now three elements responsible for character count announcements:
- A static element: “You can use up to 200 characters”. This is visible for non-JavaScript users, and visually hidden otherwise.
- An injected, live-updating element showing the characters remaining. This has
aria-hidden="true"to hide itself from screen readers. - An injected, debounced element showing characters remaining, visually hidden and
aria-live="polite". It only updates after 1 second of inactivity, and only announces once the user has passed the threshold (if a threshold has been set).
This looked like quite a thorny issue to resolve – well done to the Design System team for getting it updated! I hope to see an official blog post on it soon 🤞
Interesting WebAIM threads
WebAIM (“Web Accessibility In Mind”) is a non-profit organization based at Utah State University, and is most famous for its annual accessibility analysis of the top million websites.
It also has an email discussion list, whereby anyone with an accessibility question can start a thread asking for advice. These next threads landed in my inbox recently, and looked pretty interesting:
First, Links within image captions. Jo wanted to check whether having links inside <figcaption> was an accessibility fail. The consensus seemed to be that it was OK.
Next, Links that open new windows and/or go off site: “do they need to have an icon or additional text?”. There was initially consensus that the absence of these would not be a WCAG fail, but on further sleuthing, the conclusion was that it would in fact violate SC 3.2.2 .
Finally, Accessibility a external content, in which Christopher wonders if there’s a material difference between linking to, and embedding, inaccessible content. The motivation for the question was that if people knew they needed to wrap captions around an embedded video that lacks them, but didn’t need to if simply linking off to the video, then people might decide to only use linking from now on. It led to an interesting discussion, but nothing conclusive.
Introduction to Web Accessibility course
Quick shout-out to edx.org, which is offering a free “Introduction to Web Accessibility” course. It takes an estimated 4-5 hours per week, for 4 weeks, to complete the course, but you can go at your own pace.
It covers WCAG, POUR, finding W3C resources, and how you can check pages for issues.
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