Your weekly frequent11y newsletter, brought to you by @ChrisBAshton:
HTML gains a <search> element
This one came up in the work chat.
On 24th March, the “WhatWG HTML living standard” gained a new <search> element. It is intended to be used to contain a set of form controls “related to performing a search or filtering operation”. Example code snippet:
<search>
<form action="search.php">
<label for="query">Find an article</label>
<input id="query" name="q" type="search">
<button type="submit">Go!</button>
</form>
</search>Functionally, it is the equivalent of using <div role="search">. The contributors that proposed it did not like the fact that this could only be expressed in ARIA (after all, the first rule of ARIA is to not use ARIA). See the original issue and the resulting pull request.
Quite what this means for browsers is hazy. WHATWG is a community with oversight from Apple, Google, Mozilla and Microsoft (i.e. the companies that build our browsers) so it should be supported in browsers at some point, but there is no clear timeline. See the WHATWG FAQ for details.
Building inclusive products for trans people
Chiara Angori shares some great tips for building products that don’t exclude your trans users.
Some are obvious, such as allowing users to specify their pronouns, and not asking users for their ‘title’ (Mr, Mrs, etc). Titles have no legal bearing and there’s almost never a good reason to ask for them. Even offering a get out option like “Prefer not to say” can be problematic, as some user research towards the end of the article demonstrates. Participants were worried that that option sounds “almost accusatory” and also that they were worried they’d be discriminated against for choosing it.
If asking for something sensitive like sex, e.g. in a medical context, offer three options (male, female and intersex) and provide details around why you’re asking for it. The article shows a screenshot of how the NHS app approaches this.
If you need to know a user’s legal name (or birth name), provide users a way to set their ‘preferred name’, so that trans individuals who have not yet changed their name legally can specify the name they should now be referred by. Give users options to keep their legal name confidential.
Consider enabling ‘discreet’ notifications, e.g. the Trans Memo app that helps trans people track their intake of hormones. This app enables users to replace notification text with something of their choosing, so that anyone who happens to see their notification on a lock screen etc won’t be able to easily understand what is being notified about.
Well worth a read.
Why Motion on Websites and Digital Content Is a Problem
Meryl Evans describes how at times she feels dizzy and light headed, in symptoms she describes as vertigo. 70 percent of deaf and hard of hearing children with sensorineural hearing loss have a vestibular disorder, which is also expected to affect “more than 35% of US adults aged 40 and older at some point in their lives”.
This demographic, alongside people who experience migraines, epilepsy, and general motion sickness, are sensitive to motion. It can be brought on by animated gifs, or background videos and slide shows on websites.
Meryl suggests giving viewers control over motion. Taking Twitter as an example, their accessibility settings have options to reduce motion and turn off autoplay. “When an image with the Play button shows up on Twitter, it’s either a video or an animated GIF. Select the image and it plays. Select the image again and it stops.”
Meryl touches on the “reduce motion” accessibility setting in operating systems, which I covered in more detail in dai11y 12/12/2022.
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