A great introduction to structuring your content well:
Using semantic HTML as building blocks for a website will give you a lovely accessible foundation upon which to add your fancy CSS and whizzy JavaScript.
Turns out I was the twelfth ever user of Dribbble—ah, memories!
Yikes!
We’re updating the way Google Docs renders documents. Over the course of the next several months, we’ll be migrating the underlying technical implementation of Docs from the current HTML-based rendering approach to a canvas-based approach to improve performance and improve consistency in how content appears across different platforms.
I’ll be very interested to see how they handle the accessibility of this move.
This is a great deep dive into a single component, a password toggle in this case. It shows how assumptions are challenged and different circumstances are considered in order to make it truly resilient.
A very comprehensive directory of accessibility resources.
Given the widespread browser support for prefers-reduced-motion now, this approach makes a lot of sense.
A good tutorial on making password fields accessible when you’ve got the option to show and hide the input.
Vitaly has rounded up a whole load of accessibility posts. I think I’ve linked to most of them at some point, but it’s great to have them all gathered together in one place.
I really like the approach that Carie takes here. Instead of pointing to specific patterns to use, she provides a framework for evaluating technology. Solutions come and go but this kind of critical thinking is a long-lasting skill.
Based on the problems with accessiBe and its ilk, I have signed my name to this:
- We will never advocate, recommend, or integrate an overlay which deceptively markets itself as providing automated compliance with laws or standards.
- We will always advocate for the remediation of accessibility issues at the source of the original error.
- We will refuse to stay silent when overlay vendors use deception to market their products.
- More specifically, we hereby advocate for the removal of accessiBe, AudioEye, UserWay, User1st, MK-Sense, and all similar products and encourage the site owners who’ve implemented these products to use more robust, independent, and permanent strategies to making their sites more accessible.
This is a really interesting take on the intersection between accessibility and progressive enhancement (which I always felt was there, but this expresses it well):
Accessibility aims to optimize an experience across a spectrum of user capabilities. Progressive enhancement aims to optimize an experience across a spectrum of user agent capabilities.
Indeed, if you broaden the definition of “user agent” to include a user’s physiology, I think the concepts become nearly identical.
Vasilis offers some research that counters this proposal.
It makes much more sense to start each page with the content people expect on that page. Right? And if you really need navigation (which is terribly overrated if you ask me) you can add it in the footer. Which is the correct place for metadata anyway.
That’s what I’ve done on The Session.
I like this proposal, and I like that it’s polyfillable (which is a perfectly cromulent word).
This is handy—an up-to-date list of tests run on form fields with different combinations of screen readers and browsers.
An excellent collection of advice and examples for making websites responsive and accessibile (responsive + accessible = responsible).
This looks like it’ll be a good event: a keynote from Vint Cerf and talks from Val Head, Rachel Andrew, Sara Soueidan, and others.
Best of all, it’s free!
I spent most of the weekend reading through this and I’ve still barely scratched the surface—a lot of work has gone to the analyses and write-ups!
The sections on accessibility and performance get grimmer each year but the raw numbers on framework adaption are refreshingly perspective-setting.
You’re not going to get a Webby Award or thousands of views on Codepen for how amazingly crafted your HTML is. You’ll need to be OK going unrecognized for your work. But know that every time I use a screen reader or keyboard on a site and it works correctly, I have a little spark of joy.
A blog post from the future. I’m on board with the subgenre of speculative blogging.
The street finds its own uses for things, and it may be that the use for Google Glass is assistive technology. Here’s Léonie’s in-depth hands-on review of Envision Glasses, based on Google Glass.
The short wait whilst the image is processed is mitigated by the fact a double tap is all that’s needed to request another scene description, and being able to do it just by looking at what I’m interested in and tapping a couple of times on my glasses is nothing short of happiness in a pair of spectacles.