Adactio: Links—Tagged with cc

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.

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.

ANDI - Accessibility Testing Tool - Install

Another bookmarklet for checking accessibility—kind of like tota11y—that allows to preview how screen readers will handle images, focusable elements, and more.

Using aria-live

A terrific explanation of the aria-live attribute from Ire. If you’re doing anything with Ajax, this is vital knowledge.

Drupal’s commitment to accessibility | Dries Buytaert

Shots fired!

I’ve come to believe that accessibility is not something you do for a small group of people. Accessibility is about promoting inclusion. When the product you use daily is accessible, it means that we all get to work with a greater number and a greater variety of colleagues. Accessibility benefits everyone.

Why You Should Never, Ever Use Quora – Waxy.org

Never mind their recent data breach—the reason to avoid Quora is that it’s a data roach motel.

All of Quora’s efforts to lock up its community’s contributions make it incredibly difficult to preserve when that they go away, which they someday will. If you choose to contribute to Quora, they’re actively fighting to limit future access to your own work.

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