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

CSS Can Influence Screenreaders

• Ben Myers explains that some CSS may have unintended side-effects on assistive technologies. <button style="text-transform: uppercase">Add</button>, for example, is read out as the acronym “A.D.D.” on VoiceOver. The line between presentation and content is increasingly blurred with ::before/::after pseudo elements, the output of which is compiled into the same accessibility tree consumed by screen readers. It’s a confusing world.

As a disabled person, it’s hard to watch accessibility only improve now that able-bodied are affected

• John Loeppky, a writer who has cerebral palsy, describes the frustration watching “the adaptations many of us beg for — remote working, live streamed art, food delivery — become ubiquitous and unchallenged as soon as abled people find themselves needing them”. Food delivery services in Canada are oversubscribed in the current pandemic, and supermarkets in Britain are encouraging all but the most vulnerable in society to visit stores. Be mindful, everyone.

How accessible is the HTML video player?

• Scott Vinkle concludes that the native HTML video player is not particularly accessible, citing a number of issues in certain browser / AT combinations. For example, content ‘behind’ full screen video can still be navigable when it shouldn’t be; controls aren’t always announced when using the tab key; continuous announcements about the current lapsed value distract from the video content. Scott uses Plyr instead, and acknowledges that native YouTube/Vimeo players aren’t suitable for him as he needs to support multiple platforms.

The WebAIM Million – An annual accessibility analysis of the top 1,000,000 home pages

• A discouraging report on the accessibility of the top 1 million homepages. 98.1% failed at least one WCAG 2 criterion. Most commonly, this was low contrast text (86.3% of all homepages), missing alt text (66% – over half of these were linked images), empty links (59.9%), or missing form input labels (53.8%). All of these (with the exception of alt text) are worse than they were last year. It’s also interesting to note that accessibility varies by site category, language and TLD (law/politics-based English sites on .gov domains tend to be better, news & adult based sites in Russian/Chinese tend to be worse).

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