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

How I disclose my disability during a job search

• Haley Moss describes the experience of applying for jobs and wondering when and whether to disclose her autism, for fear of being treated differently. Haley suggests disclosure should generally happen only when you realise you can’t perform an essential function of your job because of your disability and need an accommodation. Most accommodations require little to no financial investment, such as allowing you to wear headphones to drown out office noise. How much to disclose, and how you do it, depends on why you’re disclosing it and who you are talking to.

On Voice Coding

• Dusty Phillips shares his experience of using his voice to code, triggered by a carpal tunnel syndrome diagnosis a few months ago. He invested around a thousand dollars in his setup, which includes Dragon Naturallyspeaking, a Windows machine and a high-end microphone. Dusty uses Caster, which is built on top of Dragon, for coding-oriented voice commands. The article describes his configuration in great detail, and there’s a video of voice coding in the comments if you want to see something similar in action.

The First U.S. Web Accessibility Agreement was Signed Twenty Years Ago

• On March 14th, 2000, Bank of America was the first US company to sign an agreement to make its website accessible, referencing WCAG 1.0 (only a few months old at the time). It was the output of a ‘structured negotiation’ between the bank and five blind customers. The bank hired a mutually agreed accessibility consultant, Shawn Henry, to oversee the work. It’s interesting to note that no lawsuit was required, and that digital accessibility in law is now two decades old.

Video game accessibility aided by consultants who say it’s not about compromising game design

• Article about how accessibility consultants are working behind the scenes to create a more inclusive video game industry. A common argument against accessibility adjustments is that they’ll ruin the ‘creative vision’ of the game. In reality, lowering difficulty settings is a cheap and unsatisfying way of ‘achieving accessibility’. It is far better to provide custom control mapping, add subtitles, enable camera snapping, etc. Another myth is that these features are rarely used, however: one third of Uncharted 4 players used the ‘one handed control’ option, and 60% of Assassins Creed: Origins players turned subtitles on.

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