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

Experimental Brain Implant Lets Man With Paralysis Turn His Thoughts Into Words

• A fascinating article describing how a paralysed man has had a device implanted into his brain, which decodes signals in the brain that once controlled his vocal tract. After several months of training, the system has a vocabulary of 50 words and the man can communicate at a rate of 15 words per minute. Normal speech is in the region of 120-150 words per minute. A professor at Stanford University acknowledges the 50-word vocabulary as a “huge achievement”, but also feels the vocabulary “could easily become 500 or 5,000 words.”
• The anonymous patient in question is in his 30s, and has been unable to speak since a stroke 15 years ago. His arms, legs and vocal tract are paralysed, but the areas of the brain that once issued speech commands are intact. There was initially some doubt that the speech commands in the brain would still work after 15 years without use.
• An ethical dilemma raised in the article is that it will be possible to “eavesdrop” on the brain. We need to ensure that such devices “allow people to be able to think their private thoughts without anything just being broadcast to the world”. This “may be easier with devices that rely on brain signals that control muscles, because these signals generally aren’t sent unless a person makes a conscious attempt at movement”.

Microsoft: Accessibility is a focus in Windows 11

• Windows 11, announced at the end of June, is being designed “with accessibility in mind”.
• The OS will include dark, light and customisable themes, and the improved Closed Captions will be more customisable too.
• Microsoft have rebranded the old “Ease of Access” setting to the more idiomatic “Accessibility”, to make it easier to find your settings.
• Like Windows 10, the new OS will include assistive tech including Narrator, Magnifier, Closed Captions, Windows Speech Recognition and Windows Voice Typing.
• Finally, Windows 11 will support Linux applications via something called WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux), which is being carefully developed to integrate with assistive technologies.

Will Accessibility Become Increasingly Important for SEO?

• A deque blog post, with no clear answer – but an interesting topic nonetheless.
• Google has for years made mobile usability and speed a factor in SEO – Search Engine Optimisation – meaning that they favour websites which work well on mobile and load fast, and in turn, rank the website more highly in search results.
• Google states that “everyone should be able to access and enjoy the web. We’re committed to making that a reality”. Google’s Lighthouse tool, which measures website performance and accessibility, provides accessibility scores which could very well lend themselves to an SEO ranking algorithm in the foreseeable future.
• The article acknowledges that there is already a coincidental link between accessibility and SEO. Accessible pages tend to be well marked up pages, containing metadata, descriptive link text and headings, and alt text.

Accessible Overflow

• A fascinating insight into browser behaviour by Marcus Herrmann. When navigating ‘overflow’ content, i.e. text that doesn’t fit inside its container, this requires us to scroll through the content. Many of us would simply use the mouse wheel to scroll within those containers, but how about users who navigate by keyboard? Keyboard users use the up and down arrows to move up and down the page, but what about the overflow content within the page?
• Firefox automatically puts such content in the tab order, making it reachable and its contents scrollable. In Chrome, Edge and Safari, however, overflow content is not scrollable with a keyboard by default. There is a Webkit issue and a Chrome intent to ship, but otherwise developers are stuck using the following workaround:
  1. Add tabindex="0" to the container
  2. Apply focus styles to the container, e.g. .my-owerflowing-div:focus { outline: 2px solid; }
  3. Add role="region" and supply an accessible name using, for example, an aria-label.
• Adrian Roselli wrote about this in more detail in Keyboard and Overflow.

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.