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

6 webinars from GDS to improve accessibility within your organisation

• A curated list of videos from the Global Accessibility Awareness Day (21 May 2020): Introduction to the Public Sector Bodies accessibility regulations (34m), How to make your PDFs accessible (17m), How to engage your workforce on accessibility (16m), How to avoid common accessibility statement fails (42m), How to carry out basic web accessibility checks (58m), How to build digital services that work for everyone (30m).

Typing With One Hand on Your iPhone Just Got a Little Easier

• As iPhones get bigger, it can be harder to reach certain keys on your keyboard when using just one hand. Apple have built a “One-Handed Keyboard” mode, which squashes the keys together and makes it easier to reach any given key with your thumb. To enable: when using the keyboard in any app, press and hold the globe icon in the bottom left corner and choose “Keyboard settings”, then switch to right-handed or left-handed keyboard.

What to look for in an accessibility audit

• A blog post by Glenda Sims, describing Deque’s different audit offerings. Clients need to choose the browsers and assistive technologies included in the audit, though this needs to be balanced against the cost of testing. Pragmatically, Glenda claims that using Chrome with NVDA will catch >90% of accessibility issues. Clients also need to choose which pages to test, which should include the site’s entry points, core paths and highest traffic pages. Lastly, they must choose what standard to test against: usually WCAG 2.1 Level A (lowest level of conformance) or AA.

Five Things I Use My Phone For On A Daily Basis

• Luke Sam Sowden, who is “Severely Partially Sighted”, describes how he uses the accessibility features of his iPhone XR, and apps. He uses Microsoft Seeing AI, Tap Tap See and Digit-Eyes to use his phone’s camera to recognise objects, people and text in his surroundings. Google Maps gives good directions. The built-in Camera App is VoiceOver-compatible and tells him where his face is on the screen if he’s trying to take a selfie. Finally, he finds Twitter and Instagram quite accessible – the latter is improving with “Photo descriptions” and Instagram Stories.

AudioEye Sues AccessiBe for Patent Infringement

• AudioEye is suing accessiBe for allegedly using tech that AudioEye has a U.S. patent on (patent no. 10,762,280). Both companies are involved with accessibility. accessiBe announced 12 million dollars of funding in May 2020. The article laments the fact that one a11y-focussed company is suing another, and wishes the money was spent improving the lives of disabled people instead. You can read the legal filing by AudioEye, but I’m inclined to agree that it’s a waste.

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