week11y issue 21

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

Accessibility Maze

  • A game developed by The Chang School, Ryerson University (Ontario). It simulates various challenges which are only overcome by good accessible design, providing good metaphors that encourage things like alt text. I don’t want to give too much away as it would ruin the game – it’s extremely well made and only takes around ten minutes to complete, and there’s a handy accessibility booklet to download as a ‘prize’ at the end. Give it a play!

Cleaning our way to accessibility

  • A post from the good folks at leeds.gov.uk, describing how they’ve been working through the 9,800 inaccessible PDFs on their site. Making them all compliant would cost huge amounts of time and money. Instead, they’re assessing each document on its own merit and asking if it serves a user need. They’re gradually bringing the content into web pages, or removing it altogether: they’ve now removed over 3,000 documents. They have a dedicated maintenance team tasked with chipping away at the remaining documents. Like all good technological ceremonies, they’ve taken inspiration from Sweden and practice ‘death cleaning’.

Quick Tip: How to Convert Image Text to Text

  • If you have an image with text and want to retrieve the text from it without typing it all out by hand, you can upload the image to Google Drive. Once uploaded, “Open with Google Docs” (by right-clicking and selecting the option from the contextual menu). A new Google Docs file will be created, with the image at the top and the converted text underneath.

Unexpected accessibility tips

  • An article in broken English, but don’t let that put you off. Chris Cid shares tips for testing your app: use it on your train commute to work (one-handed usage, motion sickness, etc). Test it on people who are in a hurry (grab someone outside a WC!) to simulate lots of distractions, ADHD. Hold your mobile with straight arms, use keyboard only, and wear thick gloves when using a mouse, to test various motor a11y issues. Test your UI colour contrast with a cheap projector in a bright room. Finally, take off your glasses and see how well you can scan for information.

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