Personas are often toothless, but these accessibility personas from gov.uk are more practical and useful than most:
Each profile has a different simulation of their persona’s condition and runs the assistive technology they use to help them.
You can use these profiles to experience the web from the perspective of the personas and gain more understanding of accessibility issues.
A fascinating account of the history of JAWS and NVDA.
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.
This is a terrific explanation of the concept of accessible names in HTML, written with verve and style!
Contrary to what you may think, naming an element involves neither a birth certificate nor the HTML
nameattribute. Thenameattribute is never directly exposed to the user, and is used only when submitting forms. Birth certificates have thus far been ignored by spec authors as a potential method for naming controls, but perhaps when web UI becomes sentient and self-propagating, we’ll need to revisit that.
Some really interesting ideas here from Hidde on how browsers could provide optional settings for users to override developers when it comes to accessibility issues like colour contrast, focus styles, and autoplaying videos.
Tough, but fair.
Some good advice from Hidde, based on his recent talk Six ways to make your site more accessible.
An even-handed assessment of the benefits and dangers of machine learning.
When to use aria-hidden="true", and when you might need display: none:
aria-hiddenby itself is not enough to completely hide an element from all users, if that is the end goal.
When to use role="presentation" (or role="none"):
Where
aria-hiddencan be used to completely hide content from assistive technology, modifying an element’sroleto “none” or “presentation” removes the semantics of the element, but does not hide the content from assistive technologies.
A whoooole bunch of links about inclusive design, gathered together from a presentation.
Jamie has put his talks online, complete with transcripts:
One of the accessibility features built into OS X:
Using Switch Control, and tapping a small switch with his head, my son tweets, texts, types emails, makes FaceTime calls, operates the TV, studies at university online, runs a video-editing business using Final Cut Pro on his Mac, plays games, listens to music, turns on lights and air-conditioners in the house and even pilots a drone!
The Government Digital Service have published the results of their assistive technology survey, which makes a nice companion piece to Heydon’s survey. It’s worth noting that the most common assistive technology isn’t screen readers; it’s screen magnifiers. See also this Guardian article on the prevalence of partial blindness:
Of all those registered blind or partially sighted, 93% retain some useful vision – often enough to read a book or watch a film. But this can lead to misunderstanding and confusion
Prompted by the Bespin fuss, Derek shares his thoughts on *when* accessibility should be integrated into products.
Stevie Wonder talks about assistive technology. I think this finally proves that yes, accessibility *is* sexy!
A free screen reader. If this turns out to be any good, it could be a game-changer: a long overdue kick in the behind for Freedom Scientific.
It's easy for us to take technology for granted. This video shows how transformative technology can be. I am humbled.
Derek points to a new piece of assistive technology and wonders where the next innovation will come from.