week11y issue 75

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

Should you use an <h1> in email code?

  • A thorough investigation by Mark Robbins, looking at the state of webmail across a dozen different providers.
  • 60% of screen reader users prefer pages containing just one <h1> with the document title, whereas 33.3% prefer two <h1> headings, for the site name and the title.
  • Given a preference for one <h1> tag per page, the question is: should you include a <h1> in the emails you send people, or would that conflict with a <h1> that already exists in the webmail client? In other words, when viewing an email on gmail.com, how many <h1> tags are there?
  • Mark found that most webmail clients don’t add a <h1> to the page when viewing an email. I verified this by opening an email on gmail.com and inspecting the subject line, which is marked up as a <h2>. A couple of webmail providers do include a <h1> in the page, but their market share is low, and leaving out <h1> tags would do more harm to the many users of the other webmail clients.
  • Mark’s advice is to therefore include a <h1> tag in your emails. That’s easier said than done, of course – it only really works for email designers using professional services such as Mailchimp. For one person sending an email to another person, it’s not so easy.
Mocked up design of how a Wikipedia 'accessibility options' panel might work.
(Image credit: Kevinsdesign)

We asked an expert to redesign Wikipedia – here’s what they came up with

  • TechRadar Pro asked UK-based designer Kevinsdesign to improve the design of Wikipedia. The screenshots in the article are fun to look through, showcasing a useful ‘table of contents’ side panel, a homepage of discovery options, and accessibility and language options brought to the forefront.
  • Kevinsdesign interviewed four users to discover their friction points with the existing website, before mocking up the designs. He spent most of his time thinking through the accessibility options. He said:
  • “Wikipedia is accessed by billions worldwide with the common goal of consuming written articles, however reading isn’t a given for everyone, between 5-10% of the population are dyslexic (myself included), even more have visual impairments and so on. Things like colour contrast, font size, and even black text on white backgrounds can make content very hard to consume.”
  • “I asked the question: could I bake in accessibility options to the new design that would break down these barriers and make Wikipedia more accessible to people? The new accessibility option in the menu allows the user to customize the setting to their needs, be it making the font size bigger, making the content seizure safe, changing the font to child friendly and even adding a color overlay to the article which for many dyslexics massively helps them read.”
  • These options are captured in the screenshot above.

Wix Launches First of Its Kind Accessibility Tool to Help Make The Web Accessible for Everyone

  • Wix is a popular platform for building and hosting websites, choosing from pre-built themes and customising the content. It has now launched its ‘Accessibility Wizard’, which is built into the CMS.
  • You can use the wizard to scan your site for accessibility issues, detecting things like images with missing alt text, improper heading orders, or insufficient colour contrast. The wizard provides detailed instructions on how to fix each issue.
  • The article above is frustratingly thin on detail, but you can find out more on Wix’s official blog post. It arose from a checklist which Wix created and asked website editors to follow, but users found this too heavy and time-consuming to follow.

What Is It Like to Use a Screen Reader?

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