week11y issue 17

Your weekly frequent11y newsletter, brought to you by @ChrisBAshton:

‘Show Me a Sign’ recounts the deaf experience for young readers

  • MV Times article from last December, describing Ann Clare Le Zotte‘s new novel “Show me a Sign”, which is now available online. It is set in early 19th century Chilmark, Massachusetts – a town famous for its unusually high percentage of deaf citizens (one in 25 people, vs one in 6000 on the mainland). Everyone could communicate with one another, deaf or not, through Martha’s Vineyard Sign Language (MVSL). It sounds like an exciting read, centered around a scientist that uses Mary as a “live specimen” in a cruel experiment, tribal/colonial tensions of the time, and an insight into how Mary lives without sound.

Why the GOV.UK Design System team changed the input type for numbers

  • Article by Hanna Laakso, explaining why GOV.UK has moved away from using <input type="number"> for things like credit card / passport numbers. It has big issues in NVDA and Dragon Naturally Speaking, and its native increment/decrement behaviour (triggered by UP/DOWN arrow keys or scrolling) is often unintended. Some browsers also attempt to round the number or add comma separation. GOV.UK now uses <input type="text" inputmode="numeric" pattern="[0-9]*">, which retains the numeric keyboard without compromising usability.

7 users share their struggles navigating the (sometimes inaccessible) digital world

  • Real users with disabilities sum up their biggest struggles with the digital world. Robert (who has a visual impairment) struggles with date inputs where websites don’t let you enter the date manually, forcing him to navigate an often inaccessible calendar. Rhian, who is autistic, shares her frustration with auto-playing videos and poor website load speeds. Sally, who has a mobility impairment, says that increasing font sizes is hard in apps, and that zooming causes its own problems. Kasia needs someone’s assistance when online shopping, as they don’t feel comfortable sharing their bank details on inaccessible sites where it is difficult to know if they’re filling it in correctly. Several complain about CAPTCHA forms that force you to prove you’re not a robot.

Could browsers fix more accessibility problems automatically?

  • Whilst web developers/designers have a duty to make their website accessible, many simply don’t – be it through lack of awareness, skills, resources or empathy. Hidde de Vries proposes that browsers bridge the gap by providing ways of forcing colour contrasts, focus states, text sizes, disabling autoplay and allowing zoom, even if a developer has explicitly disabled such features. Some browsers do some (but not all) of this already, and what does exist is not easily discoverable.

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