frequent11y is now 1 year old! 🎉 Since the first issue of dai11y on 28th October 2019, I’ve published well over 200 posts covering design, technology, science and ethics in the world of accessibility. I’ve been really enjoying reading so many articles and sharing them with you, and I’ve really appreciated the nice comments and encouragement from you. Please continue to share the newsletter with your friends and colleagues.

Looking to the future – would you like me to cover any topics I haven’t covered yet? Is there a way I can improve the format? Let me know your comments by emailing me at chris@ashton.codes or reaching out to me on Twitter. Thanks in advance! Without further ado…

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

Intro to Web Accessibility (see video)

• What could be a more appropriate 1-year anniversary post than this excellent presentation by Michele A. Williams? In just 16 minutes she explains accessibility in great detail, starting with no assumed knowledge, and bringing the audience up to a good level of understanding about WCAG, WAI, HTML standards, Assistive Technology and team responsibilities. I learned something too – that JAWS stands for Job Access With Speech. A highly recommended watch for anyone new to accessibility!

Google Slides – Present slides with captions

• When you present Google Slides, you can turn on automatic captions to display your words in real time as you speak them (this only works with Chrome devices set to U.S. English). After you click “Present”, click the “CC” button or use CTRL + SHIFT + C (use CMD instead of CTRL on Mac). As you speak, captions appear at the bottom of the screen (but they won’t include punctuation). To change text position or size, click the drop-down menu Down arrow next to the “CC” button.

:focus-visible Is Here

• Matthias Ott writes about the situation where clicking on an element activates its :focus styles – something that can be perceived as ugly. With this new property, you can style elements if they receive keyboard focus, while avoiding styling if they receive focus via mouse click. Example: :focus:not(:focus-visible) { outline: 0 } paired with :focus-visible { outline: 3px solid blue }.

Games are being remastered with little thought to accessibility

• This article came out in June in response to a slew of remastered games being released around May. Many of these games from circa 2010 lacked accessibility features at the time, and haven’t been given any accessibility love in the remaster, lacking basic things like controls mapping. The author shows lots of screenshots and provides a quick overview of games including Mafia 2 and Minecraft Dungeons. Worth a read to remind ourselves how generally terrible in-game subtitles are.

How we recruited people with low/no digital skills on Carer’s Allowance

• A GOV.UK blog from 2015. They wanted to find people on the lowest end of the digital inclusion scale for user research, to ensure a service they were building could be used by anybody. Asking people “How would you rate your computer skills?” wasn’t a reliable indicator of digital literacy as people tend to underestimate their skills and subsequently complete tasks with ease. Making people score themselves against explicit criteria, e.g. “How comfortable are you finding stuff using a search engine such as Google”, was a much better way of finding participants on the lower end of the scale.

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