Your weekly frequent11y newsletter, brought to you by @ChrisBAshton:
Can the internet be made accessible for all?
This is a video clip (5m28s) from the BBC’s Dragon’s Den. Rene and Andy Perkins have founded a company, CityMaaS, aimed at improving accessibility on the web. They’ve created a product, Assist Me, which they hope to see companies embed on their websites (at a subscription fee of £30 to £45 per month). Assist Me is a button that triggers a popup menu where the user can adjust font size, turn on a screen reader, etc. In other words, this is an accessibility overlay.
The investors didn’t probe into why accessibility overlays are bad, but did express that this sort of assistive technology should exist on the user’s machine so that it can be used on any website. The founders’ response was that this puts the onus (and expense) on the user, and is therefore wrong.
The company has a couple of other products but they didn’t get much airtime. The Mobility Map looked promising – a way of seeing the accessibility information of any public place. But it’s behind a paywall, which is disappointing, as I really think there’s a gap in the market for making it easier to find accessible housing.
None of their products look any good to me, but I do applaud any opportunity to raise awareness of digital accessibility issues on prime time TV.
Braille Scanner iOS app
Developer Aaron Stephenson has developed a free ‘Braille Scanner’ app for iOS, which allows you to take a picture of a paper Braille document, and it will convert it to text, using a combination of image processing and machine learning. It supports Unified English Braille grade 1 and does not currently read other types of Braille.
One use case would be for people who are learning Braille and want to double-check what they’ve written. Watch a video demonstrating how Braille Scanner works on Twitter.
Free events at AbilityNet
Kelly from the charity AbilityNet got in touch with me to let me know about some free events that might be of interest to frequent11y readers.
Training on Wednesday 4th May (10am BST): How to build a disability inclusive workplace. “Discover where your organisation currently sits on our disability inclusion gap analysis scale overall and at each stage in the employee lifecycle”.
The “inert” attribute is finally coming to the web
Stefan Judis writes about the HTML inert attribute. When applied to a container, it renders all children inaccessible, i.e. you can no longer tab to or interact with any form elements within.
This will be super useful for properly implenting modal windows, such as a confirmation dialog asking if you’re sure you want to delete your account. With inert, you can ensure the user can’t tab away from the modal and continue to navigate around the page.
Browser support has been very poor, but that’s about to change. Stefan summarises:
Now, Safari Tech Preview ships it with
v143, Chrome will enable the attribute with Chrome 102 in May and Firefox implements the feature behind thehtml5.inert.enabledflag.
PS: Stefan writes a fantastic weekly newsletter about web development – I suggest checking it out!
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