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

WebAIM Million – 2021 Update

• This is an annual report that uses the WAVE web accessibility testing tool to analyse the homepages of the top 1 million websites. Compared to last year:
  • The number of detectable accessibility errors dropped from 60.9 to 51.4.
  • The number of DOM elements in the page has increased from 864 to 887.
  • 97.4% of home pages had detectable WCAG 2 failures, down from 98.1%. These were most commonly missing alt text, empty links & buttons, missing language metadata and low contrast text. The latter affected 86.4% of all homepages.
  • Almost half of all form inputs are not properly labelled. However, more websites are properly using headings.
  • The presence of JavaScript libraries (and, counter-intuitively, the presence of ARIA) tends to correlate with a higher number of accessibility errors.
  • .ru (Russian) and .cn (Chinese) websites had twice as many accessibility errors as .us (American) and .ca (Canadian) websites.
  • And finally, a sign of the system working(?): web site categories that were subject to increased civil rights complaints and lawsuits in 2020 were among the most improved.

Accessibility devices at CES 2021 reflect growing focus on inclusive tech

• The entirely virtual CES in January 2021 saw a number of assistive technologies, as companies begin to realise the importance of inclusivity and the money that can be made. Some highlights include:
  • Mantis Q40 – a $2.5k QWERTY keyboard with built-in braille display.
  • Oticon More – a hearing aid with built-in neural network, trained on 12 million real life sounds, to help process speech in noisy environments.
  • Sravi – an app that uses AI based lip-reading technology to recognise specific phrases from lip movements. It is aimed at people with speech difficulties, or patients in critical care with ailments that render them incapable of speaking. The app is in trials within the UK’s National Health Service.

iOS 14 review: access all areas?

• This is another one from the bookmarks that I’ve just gotten around to reading! Colin Hughes reviews the accessibility of iOS 14. He has muscular dystrophy and therefore relies on voice control.
• Since iOS 11, iPhone users have been able to activate an auto-answer capability for incoming phone calls, but Colin notes that it requires you to touch the screen to set it up in the first instance. You can also make calls by saying “Hey Siri, call…”, but there’s no equivalent for ending the call, so if you go to voicemail you are stuck until the mailbox times out. This is still an issue in iOS 14.
• Since iOS 13, the Announce Messages with Siri feature reads out your incoming messages and allows you to respond hands-free. Colin hoped this would be expanded to other apps like WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger, via an underlying API, but this has not happened in iOS 14.
• Voice Control now supports UK English, which has improved the accuracy of Colin’s dictation, though the accuracy remains low and using the app is frustrating when compared with Voice Access in Android 11, which is “incredible” by comparison.
• Colin also cites “improvements to the VoiceOver screen reader, a new Back Tap Feature, sign language in FaceTime calls, and Headphones Accommodations to help you hear better”. However, overall, Colin is disappointed that some of the the basics are still neglected.

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