week11y issue 82

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

Kellogg’s: a game changer in accessible packaging

In partnership with RNIB, Kellogg’s has trialled including NaviLens codes on its packaging, giving visually impaired customers a way of scanning products to find out their ingredients, allergen and recycling information.
NaviLens codes work in a similar way to QR codes, but can be detected “in a fraction of the time, from up to three metres away”. RNIB and Kellogg’s deduced that NaviLens catered to more people with sight loss, rather than those with specific requirements (such as braille users).
97% of the trial’s participants agreed they’d like to see more of these accessibility features available on grocery packaging.
There’s a 5 minute video explaining more about the project.

The famous WebAIM survey this year had 1568 responses, mostly from North America and Europe, with a pretty even age split. 92.3% of respondents said they have a disability, almost 80% of which was blindness.
57.5% of respondents class themselves as “advanced” screen reader users, versus 37.4% “intermediate” and 5.1% “beginner”. This roughly correlates with their self-assessed levels of “Internet Proficiency”.
JAWS is the primary screen reader for over half of respondents, followed by NVDA on around 30%. VoiceOver counts for just 6.5%. This is a decline for NVDA and VoiceOver compared to previous years. Windows Narrator is the primary reader of less than 1% of respondents, but is “commonly used” by 41% of them, compared to 30% in 2019.
Chrome is the browser of choice for 53.6% of respondents, followed by Edge at 18.4% and Firefox at 16.5%. Chrome and Edge usage has increased notably. JAWS with Chrome is by far the most common screen reader & browser combination, at 32.5%. 91.1% of respondents use Windows, vs 6.5% on Mac.
72% use iOS mobile devices, vs 25.8% on Android. This corresponds roughly with mobile screen reader usage of 71.5% on VoiceOver and 29.1% on TalkBack, and with choice of browser (Safari: 61.6%, Chrome: 24.2%).
99.4% of respondents have JavaScript enabled.
Almost two thirds of screen readers report that they are “very satisfied” with their primary screen reader, and almost a third “somewhat satisfied”.
When asked how often they use “skip links” when available, 17.5% said “Always”, 15% said “Often”, 29.7% said “Sometimes”, 22.7% said “Seldom” and 15% said “Never”. Whilst very mixed results, these are largely unchanged from the 2017 survey.
Around 39% say web content has become more accessible this year, but around 42% say there has been no change, and 18.5% say content has become less accessible.
The majority of screen reader users navigate pages by working through the headings first. About 85% of users find the use of heading levels either very useful or somewhat useful.

Accessible design: How much motion is too much motion?

Heather Waroff, Senior Designer at Microsoft, writes about interaction design. The most useful part of the article for me was the list below, developed “in conjunction with Accessibility specialists”. It describes the types of motion that are considered safe (good), risky (‘it depends’), and non-compliant (bad).
Safe Motion:
- Motion under 5 seconds, of the following types:
  - Show/Hide
  - Glowing
  - Color Transitions
  - Slides
  - Scaling
  - Fading
  - Glyph Transformations
Risky motion
- Any motion longer than 5 seconds
- Background Parallax
- Object Parallax
- Bouncing Effects
- Fast Effects
- Image Masking on Scroll
- Full Width Mask on Scroll
- Zoom on Scroll
- Scale on Scroll
Non-compliant motion
- Any motion longer than 5 seconds without a pause button
- Strobe Effects
- Rotate on Scroll
- Fast exit on Scroll
- Horizontal Directional Scrolling

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