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

ARIA in CSS

• Jeremy Keith writes about a technique (prompted by Sara Soueidan) that ‘forces’ you to create accessible experiences. You can use ARIA attributes as CSS hooks to ensure your component only looks/functions properly if said attributes are used in the HTML.
• Consider this CSS: aria-hidden['true'] { display: none }. It ensures you’re properly hiding content from both sighted and screen-reader users; the aria-hidden hides from the screen readers, and the display: none hides from sighted users*.
• *Jeremy seems to imply that display: none doesn’t hide content from screen reader users, which would indeed make this approach really clever. But display: none does hide from screen readers, so I think there’s been a misunderstanding somewhere. However, I still think the ARIA-in-CSS approach is more semantic, and could be marginally beneficial…
• Imagine if your CSS fails to load for some reason. With ARIA-in-CSS, at least screen reader users will still ignore the content. If you’d used a class instead (.hide { display: none }), then a CSS load failure would be a broken experience for everybody.

Math, schizophrenia and the story of a life saved by the Internet

• A US podcast sent in by frequent11y subscriber Nick. It’s an anonymous interview with someone who has schizophrenia. Whilst studying to become a mathematician, they were faced with severe anxiety attending the face-to-face lectures, so asked if they could just do the assignments and skip the classroom parts. They were told “no”. After dropping out of school and reaching suicidal lows, they enrolled in an online-only degree, graduated, and now have a lucrative full-time job. They hope that the pandemic leads to academia becoming more remote-friendly and accommodating of mental health.
• (The relevant portion is about 31 minutes into the podcast, or you can switch to the Transcript tab and search for “coming up, math” to find the relevant portion.)

Developing Real-Time, Automatic Sign Language Detection for Video Conferencing

• Google intern Amit Moryossef writes about a research paper on real-time sign language detection using human pose estimation. The model, called PoseNet, reduces input from a HD image to a small set of landmarks on the user’s body, which can be analysed frame-to-frame to predict whether a user is signing, to an accuracy of 83-92% – you can try this for yourself in the demo or watch the video.
• As conferencing software tends to focus on someone who is speaking verbally, it is hoped sign detection could be used to move focus to someone communicating via sign language. The researchers found a clever way of triggering the focus: when the model determines that a user is signing, it passes an ultrasonic audio tone. The audio is transmitted at 20kHz, which is outside the hearing range for humans, but fools any video conferencing application into thinking the user is speaking. This research could be used to better include those who communicate via sign language.

That Time I Tried Browsing the Web Without CSS

• Jon Kantner describes his experience with some popular sites after turning off CSS. 12.5% of users with low vision (who use assistive technology) browse the web with custom stylesheets, so sites need to have good structural markup to build upon. The most common issues Jon encountered were: images/SVGs with no width/height attributes, so appeared massive on the screen; lack of whitespace between elements (sites rendering <a>Link 1</a><a>Link 2</a>, not marked up as a list); unlabelled buttons (which would also be a huge problem for voice input or screen reader users); and missing images (e.g. logos applied with CSS background-image).
• Did you like this article? I’ve written a number of similar posts on Smashing Magazine.

The Robot That Gives Humans a Job (video, 3 minutes)

• At the “Avatar Robot Cafe” in Tokyo, all of the servers are robots – but this isn’t the typical story of automation taking peoples’ jobs. These robots are controlled by people outside of the cafe who would never be able to physically do the job otherwise. Massa – the avatar that serves Alice Levine in the clip – has severe physical disabilities that confine him to his bed. But he can control the robot waiters using sophisticated eye tracking technology, and can talk to customers to take their orders and have a conversation. The arrival of 5G could soon mean he can send his robot to any location, indoor or out. It provides Massa “a huge amount of hope”.
• Watch the full episode of Kevin McCloud’s Rough Guide to the Future on Channel 4 (47 minutes).

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