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

Don’t Believe the Type! (video, 50m)

• I discovered this axe-con 2021 video via Richard Morton’s tweet. I thought it would be good to follow-up on the piece I wrote about the Hyperlegible font.
• The presentation, by Gareth Ford Williams, David Bailey and Bruno Maag, talks through the data they’ve gathered from around 7,000 hours of user research. They conclude that some so-called ‘accessible’ fonts such as “Open Dyslexic” actually perform worse than standard fonts like Helvetica. However, some accessible fonts perform better, including Atkinson Hyperlegible and BBC Reith Sans.
• That said, the poor performing fonts “may have fallen into the ‘I hate Comic Sans’ trap”, as they all look quite exaggerated. The top performers were all sans serif fonts.
• The presenters admit that the survey raises lots of questions, rather than giving lots of answers! But TLDR: that ‘accessible’ font you’re using may not be as accessible as you think.

Audio killed the video call

• An interesting article talking about the progression from, pre-pandemic, video-calls happening once or twice a week, to mid-pandemic, where video calls happen for several hours per day. The video fatigue has led to an explosion in popularity for audio-based apps, such as Clubhouse, where users can drop into chatrooms and participate in discussions with strangers.
• They’re able to “recreate serendipitous moments like chance encounters and coffee machine conversations”, in a way that Zoom doesn’t. But they are ableist by nature, offering poor or zero experience for the Deaf community.
• The article touches on an interesting point: that this “levels the playing field”; insofar as many blind people “have little interest” in social media apps such as Instagram. The implication is that by the nature of these apps, they’re not going to offer much to certain segments of the disabled community, and there are usually other options to cater to everyone.
• That’s a difficult line to take, in my opinion. But it does make me wonder how everyone’s needs can be met without fundamentally changing the offering of these apps.

Some questions on accessibility in email — answered

• Some interesting nuggets of information here, resulting from a survey of 162 respondents (yes, the sample size is too small to have a lot of confidence in these results).
• 98% of people find a font size of 16px easy to read, compared to 70% for 14px (a font size that is “often cited as being accessible”). Participants generally did not find 12px easy to read.
• 88% of participants found a line height of 1.5em easy to read; it was the best performing line height out of the options available (various options from 1em to 2em).
• There was a clear preference for “accessible text links” (links using border-bottom for their underline), rather than the standard text-decoration: underline links. This approach is to “benefit people living with dyslexia, for whom underlining can cause text to run together, or collide”. I don’t remember coming across this before, so the Accessible Text Links article is worth a read too.

In Quest of Search

• Sara Souedian gives her thoughts on why we need a native <search> HTML element. This would be syntactic sugar for <div role="search">, like we already have for <main> / <div role="main">.
• The first rule of ARIA is to not use it if there is a native HTML element with the semantics of the required behaviour already built in. It could be argued that ARIA should be phased out, “with HTML replacing ARIA bit by bit until its services are no longer required”.
• Search is such a common feature on websites that making it easier to apply accessible semantics can only be a plus. With it, it should be even easier for users of assistive technologies to jump to the search section of the page.
• There is a related GitHub issue on the whatwg/html repository, calling for a HTML search element.

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