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How studying fruit flies might help us prevent age-related hearing loss in humans
- Fruit flies are prone to age-related hearing loss – just like humans, whose molecular pathways of hearing are very similar – maintaining their sensitive hearing for about 85% of their 58 day lives. The article goes into more scientific detail than I’m able to summarise here, but the TLDR is that gene therapies have been applied to fruit flies such that older flies had hearing capabilities similar to younger flies. The same approach could in theory be applied to humans.
- On BBC Radio 4 this morning, they were talking about how dogs can be trained to detect coronavirus in humans, and could be used for mass screenings at places like airports and train stations. Each dog takes around 8 weeks to train, and can process 250 people per hour. This initiative is still at the early feasibility study stage, and is asking for volunteers who have recently tested positive for coronavirus to apply for a training pack. The pack contains a mask and a T-shirt to wear for a few hours, and a prepaid envelope to return the worn contents to ARCTEC for training. A successful program could re-enable global travel.
Here are a couple of interesting articles focused on accessibility law suits in the USA, but well worth a read wherever you live: Expert witnesses in web accessibility cases (Part 1) and Expert witnesses in web accessibility cases (Part 2).
- In Part 1, Ken Nakata describes the Daubert standard of expert witness testimony, which requires that a scientific methodology is followed (peer-review, standards followed, widespread acceptance within the community, etc). Testimonies fail because they’re too high level, describing a general audit, which is “not a sufficient replacement for a proper explanation of overall methodology and process” [pertaining to this specific case].
- In part 2, Ken gets more specific. Many testimonies fail because they’re too broad, describing all the WCAG issues encountered, as that’s what accessibility specialists are used to doing in their reports. They should instead concentrate solely on issues that caused the plaintiff to “suffer injury”, where the “injury can be traced to the defendant’s illegal conduct”. So a blind person can sue a site where they were unable to purchase a product (the injury) if the site has not been built to be accessible to a screen reader (the illegal conduct). On the other hand, a blind person couldn’t sue a site for having a video missing captions because lack of captioning alone should not injure the blind plaintiff; a deaf plaintiff would have more grounds.
Accessible HTML toggle buttons
- Erik Kroes describes his accessible toggle switch, which makes use of a
<button>withrole="switch"andaria-checked="true"attributes. He chose<button>because “I want something to change instantly which a checkbox really should not be doing. In my experience, checkboxes that change things often clash with WCAG Criterion 3.2.1: On Focus. A aligns better with the goal of instant change”. It’s always interesting to see how different devs approach this problem.
- Webhint is an OpenJS Foundation project backed by Microsoft, that lints your website for accessibility, speed and cross-browser compatibility. It can be installed as a CLI tool, a browser extension, or run directly from the webhint scanner page. I tried it on one of my sites and though it didn’t find any accessibility issues, it found a lot of redundant meta tags which I should consider removing. A talk by Rachel Weil includes a live demonstration of the usage.
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