Tags: accessibility

Accessibility Events | CSS-Tricks

If you’re using Apple’s VoiceOver, both your phone and your computer will broadcast your assumed disability to the entire internet, unless and until you specifically tell it to stop.

Improving accessibility with accessibility acceptance criteria — Paul Hayes

Wouldn’t it be great if every component in your design system had accessibility acceptance criteria? Paul has some good advice for putting those together:

• Start with accessibility needs
• Don’t be too generic
• Don’t define the solution
• Iterate criteria

Defining Productivity — Jeremy Wagner

We have a tendency in our line of work to assume that what benefits us as developers translates to a benefit for those who use what we make. This is an unsafe assumption.

Accessibility for Vestibular Disorders: How My Temporary Disability Changed My Perspective · An A List Apart Article

This is a fascinating insight into what it’s like to use the web if you’ve got vertigo (which is way more common than you might think):

Really, there are no words to describe just how bad a simple parallax effect, scrolljacking, or even background-attachment: fixed would make me feel. I would rather jump on one of those 20-G centrifuges astronauts use than look at a website with parallax scrolling.

Every time I encountered it, I would put the bucket beside me to good use and be forced to lie in bed for hours as I felt the room spinning around me, and no meds could get me out of it. It was THAT bad.

Apple’s new feature a step towards digital apartheid - Axess Lab

I also discussed this accessibility events feature with my friend who is a screen reader user herself. She said it feels like it’s a first step towards a well-meant digital apartheid.

A progressive disclosure component - Andy Bell

This is a really nice write-up of creating an accessible progressive disclosure widget (a show/hide toggle).

Where it gets really interesting is when Andy shows how it could all be encapsulated into a web component with a progressive enhancement mindset

City life | Trys Mudford

Not only does the differentiation of terms create a divide within the industry, the term ‘web app’ regularly acts as an excuse for corner cutting and the exclusion of users.

Straight-talkin’ Trys:

We kid ourselves into thinking we’re building groundbreakingly complex systems that require bleeding-edge tools, but in reality, much of what we build is a way to render two things: a list, and a single item. Here are some users, here is a user. Here are your contacts, here are your messages with that contact. There ain’t much more to it than that.

The web we broke. — Ethan Marcotte

Like Eric, Ethan is feeling rightly glum about the state of accessibility on the web. But…

Right now, I’m trying to focus on this one question:

What’s one thing I wish I understood better about accessibility?

Accessibility Insights

A handy accessibility tool. The browser plug-in is only for Chrome right now (I use Firefox as my main browser) but it’s pretty nifty—the tool for visualising tabbing is really useful.

Fighting uphill | Eric Bailey

Eric is down about the current dismal state of accessibility on the web. Understandably so. It’s particularly worrying that the problem might be embedded into hiring practices:

Overwhelmingly, crushingly, we shove new developers towards learning JavaScript single page application frameworks (SPAs). While many of these frameworks pay lip service towards preserving accessibility, if you do your homework you find that the majority of them were built without assistive technology in mind.

But it’s not all doom and gloom. Eric also points to initiatives that could really help.

Still, this is a tough question to ask out loud:

What if we’re losing?

Weeknotes #5 — Paul Robert Lloyd

A nice counterpoint to the last time I linked to Paul’s weeknotes:

However, there’s another portion of the industry, primarily but not exclusively within the public sector, where traditional development approaches (progressive enhancement, server-side rendering) remain prevalent, or less likely to be dismissed, at least. Because accessibility isn’t optional when your audience is everyone, these organisations tend to attract those with a pragmatic outlook who like to work more diligently and deliberately.

Revisiting the abbr element

Ire takes a deep dive into implementing an accessible tool tip.

How do you figure? | CSS-Tricks

A good reminder from Chris—prompted by Scott O’Hara’s article—that the figcaption element and the alt attribute do different things. If you use an empty alt attribute on an img inside a figure, then your figcaption element is captioning nothing …and no, using the same text for both is not the solution.

Exclusive Design

Vasilis has published his magnificent thesis online. It’s quite lovely:

You can read this thesis in a logical order, which is the way that I wrote it. It starts with a few articles that explore the context of my research. It then continues with four chapters in which I describe the things I did. I end the thesis with four posts with findings, conclusions and recommendations.

1. Everybody’s paradox
2. The defaults suck
3. Flipping things
4. Fuckup’s mama
5. More death to more bullshit
6. Design like it’s 1999
7. Invisible Animations
8. Semantics schmemantics
9. Stress cases
10. Coders should learn how to design
11. Add nonsense
12. Conclusion

Make Your ARIA Labels Sing on Key — Knowbility

A good look at the (over)use of the aria-label attribute that confirms the first rule of ARIA.

It’s What You Make, Not How You Make It.

How did I miss this great post from 2016 by one of my favourite people‽ It’s even more more relevant today.

To me it doesn’t matter whether you write your HTML and CSS by hand or use JavaScript to generate it for you. What matters is the output, how it is structured, and how it is served to the client. When we allow our tools to take precedent over the quality of our output the entire web suffers. Sites are likely to be less accessible, less performant, and suffer from poor semantics.

The Ethics of Performance - TimKadlec.com

When you stop to consider all the implications of poor performance, it’s hard not to come to the conclusion that poor performance is an ethical issue.

The Elements of UI Engineering - Overreacted

These are good challenges to think about. Almost all of them are user-focused, and there’s a refreshing focus away from reaching for a library:

It’s tempting to read about these problems with a particular view library or a data fetching library in mind as a solution. But I encourage you to pretend that these libraries don’t exist, and read again from that perspective. How would you approach solving these issues?

The power of progressive enhancement

Andy’s slides:

We dive into why progressive enhancement is important and how we can leverage the power of Vanilla JavaScript, Web Components and modern CSS to deliver a hack-free, lightweight and progressive experience for our users.

as days pass by — Why isn’t it their job

The secret is: if you use semantic HTML, then they do the work, not you. Their browser does the work, not you. If your pages use semantic HTML, you’re not going to get bug reports saying that your web app doesn’t work in a screenreader, or your buttons don’t work without mouse clicks, or your site doesn’t show anything on a Yoyodyne SuperPhone 3 running FailBrowser, because it will and they will and it will. And using semantic HTML elements is no more effort; it’s just as easy to use main as it is to use div id="main". Easier, even.