Your weekly frequent11y newsletter, brought to you by @ChrisBAshton:
My War On Animation
Article on The Verge, as part of July’s Accessibility Week.
The author writes about their experiences navigating the web as someone who finds any animation a stimulatory overload. They acknowledge that there are documented standards for the ‘limits’ of animation on the web, such as keeping gifs to five seconds maximum. However, the documented standards don’t go far enough for the author, who finds it difficult to deal with any animations.
There’s a really succinct paragraph describing the workarounds that people resort to, and the negative knock-on effects that can have:
I can block anything ending in .gif, but it usually renders buttons nonoperative. I can load a site without styles, but usually, the result is not very enjoyable to use. I can block ads, but then it deprives the nice websites I like to read (and write for) of revenue.
They point out some technological implementations that work for all users:
There is, of course, a way to bridge this divide, and bizarrely, one of my allies is Twitter, which struck a decisive blow when it allowed users to freeze autoplay on all moving content, including GIFs. Users who love them can post them; users who don’t simply see a still frame. What’s good for reducing server load is also good for the case exceptions such as mine.
The article ends with a call to action for developers, to give users control to shape their own experience. Give people toggles to opt in and out of animations and other potential accessibility barriers.
It’s Mid-2022 and Browsers (Mostly Safari) Still Break Accessibility via Display Properties
Adrian Roselli does some manual testing of the display CSS property – with a particular focus on display: contents – across different browsers, meticulously recording the results here.
For the uninitiated, there’s a CSS Tricks article about display: contents. You can apply this to ‘wrappers’ around content, and it makes the container ‘disappear’, making the child elements appear as siblings. This allows for such elements to appear in the same CSS grid or flexbox together, and prevents the need to forego HTML semantics for the benefit of layout.
However, as the CSS Display draft points out, “this is not implemented correctly in major browsers, so using this feature on the Web must be done with care as it can prevent accessibility tools from accessing the element’s semantics”. Adrian substantiates this, confirming that, for VoiceOver, Safari in particular will fail to correctly parse tables, announce lists or make buttons easily actionable when display: contents is applied.
It’s no wonder developers are calling Safari “the new Internet Explorer”.
How to write user stories for accessibility
Not a particularly long article, but I may as well cut straight to the chase with some examples:
As a keyboard-only user, I want to know where I am on the screen so that I can perform an action or navigate to other areas of the site.
Or
As a screen reader user, I want to hear the text equivalent for each image button so that I will know what function it performs.
Accessibility user stories are just like any other user story: they start with a persona, identify the desired goal, and define the benefit to the user.
The article links to some further reading, including this GOV.UK blog post from 2018.
Am I disabled?
“With my pen hovering over a form, there is no easy answer: better to provoke stigma with support, or resist classification?”
Joanne Limburg writes about the dilemma she faces when filling in forms that ask “Do you consider yourself to be a disabled person?”
Joanne was diagnosed with autistic spectrum disorder (ASD) around the age of 42. Until then, she’d considered herself non-disabled. Even now, when she pictures disability, she pictures stock images of wheelchair icons, guide dogs, other more visible disabilities.
“Inside every Yes box is a flat, painted wheelchair stick-figure, asking me what I’m doing in their parking space”. Joanne considers ticking the No box, as her disability is invisible, and she can “sneak out in an able-bodied disguise”. Then there’s Prefer not to say – when that’s an option on the form.
Joanna says she tries to pick the option based on her best guess about what the asker thinks disability is. Does the asker think in terms of the social model of disability, for example?
“I’ve come to understand that when I pass as non-disabled, when I say No, the best that I can hope to be is an inferior version of an ideal of normality that allows only for the narrowest range of body types, cognitive styles and life trajectories, that equates the worth of a person with her economic productivity, that fetishes independence and disavows our connections to each other, and that seeks to discriminate arbitrarily between those who are allowed their full humanity and those who are denied it.”
Joanna shares her default answer to the question at the end of the essay. I won’t spoil it here!
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