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

ProPublica experiments with ultra-accessible plain language in stories about people with disabilities

• News organisation ProPublica ‘translated’ one of their articles into plain language, in an effort to be more accessible to people with intellectual/developmental disabilities.
• Here’s the original article: People with Developmental Disabilities Were Promised Help. Instead, They Face Delays and Denials.
• And here’s the plain text version: Arizona Promised to Help People With Developmental Disabilities. But Some Had to Wait a Long Time. Some Did Not Get Help at All.
• It’s fascinating to read the articles side by side and see how they compare. The plain language version simplifies sentences, writes in active voice, and uses bullet points for lists.

12 Common Words and Phrases You May Not Realise Are Ableist

• Some of these seem fairly obvious, but others less so. With respect to autism, “high or low functioning” is an ableist term I hadn’t considered. ‘Differently abled’ and ‘special needs’ are also poor euphemisms for the term ‘disabled’. ‘Tone deaf’ and ‘blind spot’ are also terms in common usage, but which harmfully link deafness/blindness with ignorance.
• The other phrases this article considers ableist are ‘imbecile’, ‘crippled’, ‘spastic’, ‘lame’, ‘suffering’ (as in “suffering from [disability]”), ‘wheelchair bound’ (in reality, many wheelchair users find their wheelchairs liberating) and finally, a saying I hadn’t heard before: “See the Able, Not the Label”.

How to start testing screen reader support using VoiceOver

• Article by Yakim van Zuijlen, describing how to use VoiceOver on a Mac to test your website. It’s aimed at beginners, but goes into quite a lot of detail, including how to find items by type (e.g. blockquote). There are some beautiful, clear illustrations throughout the article, showing which keys to press to trigger shortcuts, or how elements in the browser are grouped together by VoiceOver.

5 Ways You’re Not Making Your Website Accessible

• A listicle by Twan Mulder, which I wasn’t expecting to learn anything from – but then I learned something from the very first point! It was this:
• You often need to denote the ‘current’ page in navigation, and you see this in the wild with class="active" or similar in the markup. Instead, it should use aria-current="page", to tell screen readers this is a link to the same page they’re already on.
• The other tips are to use aria-hidden to hide decorative separators between links; add visually hidden text to your icon links; apply ARIA markup to your <div> if you insist on not using a <button>; and, somewhat obviously, provide alt text for your images.

Empathy and innovation: How Microsoft’s cultural shift is leading to new product development

• Microsoft software engineer Swetha Machanavajhala is deaf and relies on lip-reading. Whenever she Skyped her parents, she had to ask them to turn the lights off behind them so that she could more easily focus on their faces.
• She wondered if technology could solve this problem for her, so worked with Microsoft to build a background-blurring feature for Microsoft Teams and Skype (it’s not clear in the article exactly how Swetha achieved this). This feature has a useful side-effect as being a privacy tool to help users hide their backgrounds during calls.
• Thanks to Lee Goudie for pointing me towards this excellent example of Universal Design!

Did you know that you can subscribe to dai11y, week11y, fortnight11y or month11y updates! Every newsletter gets the same content; it is your choice to have short, regular emails or longer, less frequent ones. Curated with ♥ by developer @ChrisBAshton.