Tags: a11y

W3C@30: W3C and me - YouTube

This is a lovely, lovely talk from Léonie!

80 / 20 accessibility · marcus.io

So my observation is that 80% of the subject of accessibility consists of fairly simple basics that can probably be learnt in 20% of the time available. The remaining 20% are the difficult situations, edge cases, assistive technology support gaps and corners of specialised knowledge, but these are extrapolated to 100% of the subject, giving it a bad, anxiety-inducing and difficult reputation overall.

Web Content Accessibility Guidelines—or WCAG—looks very daunting. It’s a lot to take in. It’s kind of overwhelming. It’s hard to know where to start.

I recommend taking a deep breath and focusing on the four principles of accessibility. Together they spell out the cutesy acronym POUR:

1. Perceivable
2. Operable
3. Understandable
4. Robust

A lot of work has gone into distilling WCAG down to these four guidelines. Here’s how I apply them in my work…

Perceivable

I interpret this as:

Content will be legible, regardless of how it is accessed.

For example:

• The contrast between background and foreground colours will meet the ratios defined in WCAG 2.
• Content will be grouped into semantically-sensible HTML regions such as navigation, main, footer, etc.

Operable

I interpret this as:

Core functionality will be available, regardless of how it is accessed.

For example:

• I will ensure that interactive controls such as links and form inputs will be navigable with a keyboard.
• Every form control will be labelled, ideally with a visible label.

Understandable

I interpret this as:

Content will make sense, regardless of how it is accessed.

For example:

• Images will have meaningful alternative text.
• I will make sensible use of heading levels.

This is where it starts to get quite collaboritive. Working at an agency, there will some parts of website creation and maintenance that will require ongoing accessibility knowledge even when our work is finished.

For example:

• Images uploaded through a content management system will need sensible alternative text.
• Articles uploaded through a content management system will need sensible heading levels.

Robust

I interpret this as:

Content and core functionality will still work, regardless of how it is accessed.

For example:

• Drop-down controls will use the HTML select element rather than a more fragile imitation.
• I will only use JavaScript to provide functionality that isn’t possible with HTML and CSS alone.

If you’re applying a mindset of progressive enhancement, this part comes for you. If you take a different approach, you’re going to have a bad time.

Taken together, these four guidelines will get you very far without having to dive too deeply into the rest of WCAG.

The Web Accessibility Cookbook

Manu’s book is available to pre-order now. I’ve had a sneak peek and I highly recommend it!

You’ll learn how to build common patterns written accessibly in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. You’ll also start to understand how good and bad practices affect people, especially those with disabilities.

Home - Sa11y

Another handy accessibility testing tool that can be used as a bookmarklet.

Write Alt Text Like You’re Talking To A Friend – Cloud Four

This is good advice:

Write alternative text as if you’re describing the image to a friend.

I’m at day two of Indie Web Camp Brighton.

Day one was excellent. It was really hard to choose which sessions to go to because they all sounded interesting. That’s a good problem to have.

I ended up participating in:

• a session on POSSE,
• a session on NFC tags,
• a session on writing, and
• a session on testing your website that was hosted by Ros

In that testing session I shared some of the bookmarklets I use regularly.

Bookmarklets? They’re bookmarks that sit in the toolbar of your desktop browser. Just like any other bookmark, they’re links. The difference is that these links begin with javascript: rather than http. That means you can put programmatic instructions inside the link. Click the bookmark and the JavaScript gets executed.

In my mind, there are two different approaches to making a bookmarklet. One kind of bookmarklet contains lots of clever JavaScript—that’s where the smart stuff happens. The other kind of bookmarklet is deliberately dumb. All they do is take the URL of the current page and pass it to another service—that’s where the smart stuff happens.

I like that second kind of bookmarklet.

Here are some bookmarklets I’ve made. You can drag any of them up to the toolbar of your browser. Or you could create a folder called, say, “bookmarklets”, and drag these links up there.

Validation: This bookmarklet will validate the HTML of whatever page you’re on.

Validate HTML

Carbon: This bookmarklet will run the domain through the website carbon calculator.

Calculate carbon

Accessibility: This bookmarklet will run the current page through the Website Accessibility Evaluation Tools.

WAVE

Performance: This bookmarklet will take the current page and it run it through PageSpeed Insights, which includes a Lighthouse test.

PageSpeed

HTTPS: This bookmarklet will run your site through the SSL checker from SSL Labs.

SSL Report

Headers: This bookmarklet will test the security headers on your website.

Security Headers

Drag any of those links to your browser’s toolbar to “install” them. If you don’t like one, you can delete it the same way you can delete any other bookmark.

On Nielsen’s ideas about generative UI for resolving accessibility

Per Axbom quite rightly tears Jakob Nielsen a new one.

I particularly like his suggestion that you re-read Nielsen’s argument but replace the word “accessibility” with “usability”:

Assessed this way, the accessibilityusabiity movement has been a miserable failure.

AccessibilityUsability is too expensive for most companies to be able to afford everything that’s needed with the current, clumsy implementation.

jgarber623/aria-collapsible: A dependency-free Web Component that generates progressively-enhanced collapsible regions using ARIA States and Properties.

This is a really lovely little HTML web component from Jason. It does just one thing—wires up a trigger button to toggle-able content, taking care of all the ARIA for you behind the scenes.

The Folly of Chasing Demographics - YouTube

I just attended this talk from Heydon at axe-con and it was great! Of course it was highly amusing, but he also makes a profound and fundamental point about how we should be going about working on the web.

I worry our Copilot is leaving some passengers behind - Josh Collinsworth blog

Products of all kinds are required to ensure misuse is discouraged, at a minimum, if not difficult or impossible. I don’t see why LLMs should be any different.

Utopia WCAG warnings | Trys Mudford

Wouldn’t it be great if all web tools gave warnings like this?

As you generate and tweak your type scale, Utopia will now warn you if any steps fail WCAG SC 1.4.4, and tell you between which viewports the problem lies.

To hell with the business case

I agree with everything that Matt says here. Evangelising accessibility by extolling the business benefits might be a good strategy for dealing with psychopaths, but it’s a lousy way to convince most humans.

The moment you frame the case for any kind of inclusion or equity around the money an organization stands to gain (or save), you have already lost. What you have done is turn a moral case, one where you have the high ground, into an economic one, where, unless you have an MBA in your pocket, you are hopelessly out of your depth.

If you win a business-case argument, the users you wanted to benefit are no longer your north star. It’s money.

Let’s reinvent the wheel ⚒ Nerd

Vasilis gives the gist of his excellent talk at the border:none event that just wrapped up in Nuremberg. The rant at the end chimed very much with my feelings on this topic:

I showed a little interaction experiment that one of my students made, with incredible attention to detail. Absolutely brilliant in so many ways. You would expect that all design agencies would be fighting to get someone like that into their design team. But to my amazement she now works as a react native developer.

I have more of these very talented, very creative designers who know how to code, who really understand how the web works, who can actually design things for the web, with the web as a medium, who understand the invisible details, who know about the UX of HTML, who know what’s possible with modern HTML and CSS. Yet when they start working they have to choose: you either join our design team and are forced to use a tool that doesn’t get it, or you join the development team and are forced to use a ridiculous framework and make crap.

Practical Accessibility — Practical Accessibility for web designers and developers

This online course from Sara looks superb!

I know how overwhelming and even frustrating accessibility may feel at first. But I promise you, accessibility isn’t always as hard as it seems (especially if you know where and when to start!). And my goal with this course is to make it friendlier and more approachable.

Best of all, there’s $100 off if you sign up now—that’s a 25% saving.

ARIA, the good parts

The slides from Hidde’s presentation at Paris Web—a great overview of using and misusing ARIA.

Randoma11y - Accessible color combinations

Unusual colour combinations that are also accessible—keep smashing that “New colors” button.

Bruce Lawson’s personal site  : HTML popover, videos and display:blackhole

Bruce raises an interesting question with media playing in popovers—shouldn’t the media pause when the popover is closed? I agree with Bruce that this is a common use case that should be covered declaratively.

What Are Accessibility Overlays? (Webbed Briefs)

All accessibility overlays are bad. Except the ones by overlay vendors planning to sue me. Those ones are good and I highly recommend them, despite what I may say during the video. If someone is asking for an accessibility overlay, either send them here or to overlayfactsheet.com.

Inclusive Design 24 (#id24) 21 September 2023 - YouTube

This free day-long online event all about accessibility and inclusive design is happening right now. You can join live, or catch up on the talks that have already happened, like the excellent talks from Russ Weakly and Manuel Matuzović.