After a week on holiday (as best as possible in the lockdown!), I have a bumper issue for you this week!

Sa11y – accessibility quality assurance assistant

• An accessibility quality assurance tool geared towards content authors: Sa11y visually highlights common errors, with contextual information. Try out the demo.

Text link Accessibilty: aria-label and title

• Deque article testing <a> links with various combinations of title and aria-label. The conclusion is that aria-label is the best supported attribute, and links to the ARIA8 WCAG technique which sites good use cases such as: <a aria-label="Read more about Seminole tax hike">Read more...</a>.

Twitter announces change to default alt text setting

• Via TwitterA11y: starting May 27th, you no longer need a setting to add alt text to your images on Twitter. Prior to this, it was an exclusively opt-in feature.

Could coronavirus kickstart more accessible tech?

• In this BBC video, we discover how live captioning enables deaf colleagues to participate in remote meetings in this era of coronavirus. It references an article on bighack.org comparing the best video conferencing software for accessibility, which found that some popular platforms such as Zoom do not provide live captioning.

HTMHell special: close buttons

• Article by HTMHell picking apart the real-world implementations of the ‘close’ button. Some sites use images or SVGs with no alt text, some use ‘X’ to represent ‘close’ (which is lost on screen readers), some use <div> or <a> elements where a <button> is required. There are a few recommended solutions depending on the visual style you’re going for.

Is it ok to ‘grey out’ disabled buttons?

• UX Collective article that makes some interesting points: WCAG 2.1 success criterion 1.4.3 (“Contrast”) does not apply to text that is “part of an inactive user interface component”. However, if providing low-contrast styles for disabled buttons, the author encourages measures such as ensuring colour is not the only affordance, reducing opacity of the primary button colour when disabled rather than opting for grey, adding supporting text, and applying aria-disabled="true" to disabled buttons to support all screen readers.

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