Your weekly frequent11y newsletter, brought to you by @ChrisBAshton:
Sabbath mode and assistive technology features
Eric Bailey writes about the “secret mode that comes with almost all large ovens, refrigerators, dishwashers, and other large kitchen appliances”. Sabbath mode (or Shabbat mode) helps people to comply with Halakha (a body of Jewish religious laws), which forbids Jews from doing “work that creates” on Shabbat (the day of rest, Saturday).
For example, an oven can be set to Sabbath mode to keep food prepared ahead of time hot. The work to create the food and the heat to keep it warm is done outside of the bounds of the holy day.
Sabbath mode is not easy to activate: it “usually requires a very specific, non-obvious, and convoluted set of button presses”. Therefore, it is only used by those who know it exists: “activation is almost always a highly intentional act made by an individual whose background means they know the feature exists and uses it for a very specific purpose.”
Eric uses this as a metaphor for assistive technologies. Many accessibility features built into operating systems are obscure, known only by the people who rely on them. Not every Jewish person knows that Sabbath mode exists, and not every disabled person knows about or is comfortable using assistive technologies designed for their disability.
Eric concludes that it’s important to build accessible experiences by default, and not rely on your users to explicitly ‘enable’ accessibility (such as setting prefers-reduced-motion in a nested submenu somewhere on their OS). On the flipside, people who do set such modes have done so deliberately and rely on them, so don’t remove, override or subvert this functionality.
Addressing concerns about CSS Speech
LĂ©onie Watson (better known online as Tink) writes about CSS Speech. In dai11y 25/11/2022, I covered LĂ©onie making the case for CSS Speech. In this latest article, LĂ©onie specifically addresses concerns raised by the community.
People who use screen readers are worried that CSS Speech could make their experience worse, not better. They’re currently in control of the volume and speed of the speech, and are worried that giving developers influence over this could make content more difficult to understand.
LĂ©onie points out that the use case for CSS Speech is wider than just assistive technologies, and encompasses things like reader (read aloud) capability in browsers. With the wider audience, the default speech speed is likely to be too slow for the typical screen reader user.
Screen readers “have shortcuts that let you change the rate of speech on the fly”, which LĂ©onie claims screen readers often use already, e.g. slowing down the speech when reading a document that requires closer attention, before reverting back to normal speed.
Moreover, LĂ©onie quotes the CSS Speech module with regards to volume: values of x-loud vs x-soft are not intended to be dramatic or uncomfortable, but relative to your current volume level. There is an outstanding concern that the proposal allows a ‘Decibel offset’ from the chosen keyword, which could lead to more extreme volume changes, but LĂ©onie argues this option could be removed or refined further in the specification.
The “ultimate safeguard” is to ignore CSS Speech altogether, which will be possible in the same way as users can currently disable CSS globally. This isn’t ideal as not all screen reader users are blind and thus retaining visual styles is important.
The article ends with some synthesised speech samples that demonstrate the potential benefits of the module. It would be possible to configure things like news headlines to read with more impact, and the date of the news story to be announced in a more subdued manner. Listen to the demo.
removal techniques and implications
This CodePen by Vincent Valentin shows over a dozen different ways of hiding or removing content, and the implications of each for things like DOM access, keyboard access, pointer access and so on.
It’s a quick reference table that doesn’t go into detail about why you might want to use each method, but is a useful thing to bookmark nevertheless.
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