Tags: cc

Accessible Color Generator – Learn UI Design

This looks like a really useful tool for generating accessibile colour combinations from a starting colour.

Lighthouse | Eric Bailey

What if accessibility were a ranking signal for Google search results?

Here’s a thought: what if Google put its thumb on the scale again, only this time for accessibility? What if it treated the Lighthouse accessibility score as a first-class ranking metric?

Welcome to Acccessible App | Accessible App

A very welcome project from Marcus Herrmann, documenting how to make common interaction patterns accessible in popular frameworks: Vue, React, and Angular.

A report from the AMP Advisory Committee Meeting – Terence Eden’s Blog

I completely agree with every single one of Terence’s recommendations here. The difference is that, in my case, they’re just hot takes, whereas he has actually joined the AMP Advisory Committee, joined their meetings, and listened to the concerns of actual publishers.

He finds:

• AMP isn’t loved by publishers
• AMP is not accessible
• No user research
• AMP spreads fake news
• Signed Exchanges are not the answer

There’s also a very worrying anti-competitive move by Google Search in only showing AMP results to users of Google Chrome.

I’ve been emailing with Paul from the AMP team and I’ve told him that I honestly think that AMP’s goal should be to make itself redundant …the opposite of the direction it’s going in.

As I said in the meeting - if it were up to me, I’d go “Well, AMP was an interesting experiment. Now it is time to shut it down and take the lessons learned back through a proper standards process.”

I suspect that is unlikely to happen. Google shows no sign of dropping AMP. Mind you, I thought that about Google+ and Inbox, so who knows!

Good point!

Columbia & Elm; Fairfield & Gloucester. — Ethan Marcotte

Coffee talk with Ethan Marcotte. Today’s special: inclusivity.

I want to get there: to have nuanced discussions about text descriptions; I want to read poetry in alt text; to have our work’s success measured by how broadly it can be accessed; to create moving, beautiful experiences for people who may not use the web like I do.

Naming things to improve accessibility

Some good advice from Hidde, based on his recent talk Six ways to make your site more accessible.

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.

Building accessible websites and apps is a moral obligation | Go Make Things

• Morality is not always relative.
• You’re a web professional.
• The web is accessible out-of-the-box. We break it.
• It’s not on people with disabilities to tell you how you screwed up.
• It should be easier. This is our job.

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.