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

Twitter thread about “presentational list heuristics” by James Craig. The whole thing is worth a read, but here are the highlights:

• There used to be a problem with too many lists for assistive tech users: “all I hear when reading news sites is ‘list, two items … end of list, list 4 items…’ and I don’t care about all the lists.”
• This was caused by developers marking too much content up as lists, even when not appropriate.
• Therefore, WebKit now applies some heuristics to these lists, to decide whether or not to expose the list semantics to the accessibility tree.
• It considers whether the list has any bullet points. After all, if a sighted user doesn’t need to know it’s a list, then why should a screen reader user?
• Similar principles are applied to table markup, which was regularly used for layouts in the early web.
• “Many people think it’s only display: none; and visibility: hidden; but dozens, if not hundreds, of style characteristics contribute [to computing the accessibility tree].”
• False positives are extremely rare. That said, developers can force the list semantics to be obeyed by applying role="list" to the <ul>/<ol>.

5 False Claims 1-Line “AI” Accessibility Script Vendors Make (video, 13m, or read the transcript)

• Eric Eggert disputes five claims that companies [such as accessiBe] make about their products:
  1. “Accessibility can be fully automated”. Human judgement is required to determine what kind of alt text is appropriate in a given context.
  2. “AI solutions are effortless”. For you maybe, but the effort is simply shifted to the user, i.e. they now have to use the screen reader widget on your site rather than the native screen reader they’re used to.
  3. “These tools protect you from lawsuits”. Eric says that this is a scare tactic, and a poor motivator for implementing accessibility. Only 11,000 ADA Title III lawsuits happened in 2019, despite 98% of all websites not meeting WCAG 2.1, so the chance of being sued is statistically low.
  4. “It’s cheap”. These services cost $1,500 to $5,000 over a three year period of coverage. If you don’t renew, you lose those ‘benefits’, whereas if you pay an accessibility consultant to fix the problem at the source, the fix is permanent.
  5. “WCAG conformance. AA! 100%!”. Eric cites numerous examples of websites using these widgets, and still having accessibility violations. He summarises “I cannot fathom how they claim WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility.”

Colorblind Accessibility Manifesto

• colorblindaccessibilitymanifesto.com lists 10 rules developers/designers should follow to not exclude the 350 million colourblind people in the world; nearly 8% of men and 0.4% of women.
  • Start with “Why?” [you are making the change in the first place]
  • Don’t communicate only with colors
  • Design with shapes
  • Choose the right copy
  • Test your designs in black and white
  • Rethink button states
  • Use contrast
  • The smaller the item, the bigger the problems
  • Less fancy, more usable
  • More than you think [have colourblindness]

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