If you own an online shop I really suggest that you make it as accessible as possible. European Accessibility Act will require it from you, but let’s rather think about getting more customers, non-discrimination of people with disabilities and better search engine optimization as the main drivers for making eCommerce accessible.
Year: 2021
Latest posts:
To claim that our product is accessible needs more than just WCAG audit that did not discover any fails. Real users, people with disabilities are the only one that can really reflect on the accessibility of our products. That’s why we should include them in all reasonable parts of our production processes. Otherwise we may think we deliver accessibility but the truth can be opposite.
Everybody seems to publish videos online and that is not so strange with modern mobile phones all around us. But to make a video accessible we need to invest some time and effort, otherwise we risk that some people will never get to our messages in the video. I try to summarize the basics and also provide some resources that can go beyond.
A short blog of my reflections about International Day of persons with disabilities and how we should span the meaning of this day throughout the year. Digital accessibility is way easier than physical so there should be no excuses.
Inspired by others – I reflected on the origins of accessibility problems in design. It’s not so strange when we think that design is the implementation plan and if plan is not accessible then the final product will most certainly also not be accessible. Code, low-code or no-code alike.
W3c recently published Accessibility Maturity Model and I wanted to add some reflections of mine in this post. They refer to 4 maturity stages and I think there could even be 5 for some not so transparent organizations out there.
I try to summarize on the hard parts of accessibility as I detect them. Some parts of digital production are actually simpler to make accessible and some are not, so reflections on that may help you to invest resources correctly.
Sometimes people claim that accessibility is the responsibility of development and code. I disagree. It is a team effort and it can only succeed when whole team knows what to do. Content is king and if we start and end with content it can make the teams accessibility efforts much more effective.
You have probably encountered the “Skip to main content” link somewhere and maybe even thought that it is a requirement to conform to WCAG. Well it’s not. But I think you should use it anyway. Because it can literally prevent people to experience unneeded pain.
Time flies, pandemic has for sure thought us about the value of digital parallel world and that unfortunately not everybody can be a part of it. European Accessibility Act will try to do something about it. Soon but not so soon. If you are a bank or maybe just a one-person-online-shop, then you should be a bit more serious about your accessibility!
Automatic testing of software is brilliant. Saves a lot of time and effort, prevents problems soon and makes our products better. But when trying to automatically test accessibility we need to know about the challenges and problems before. Some tools may even produce wrong results and some tools may report everything is perfect when they can only test up to a third of criteria.
Mental health awareness is important throughout the year but it does not hurt to have special days with focus on it as well. I try to reflect on the accessibility and it’s role for mental health. Neurodiversity and mental health are very interconnected, so when thinking about them in our accessibility efforts it can make some positive effect for all of us!
HTML semantics and assistive technologies support is way better than PDF’s. If you are a MAC user that needs to use a screen-reader you may be forced to experience the missing semantics of even most accessible PDF’s. And maybe it is time to move more PDF documents to HTML?
Accessibility is a cross-role responsibility and this also means that documenting it has to be a common task. Cooperation and common grounds makes the teams efforts much more effective and it can mean a big difference when relevant documentation clarifies also the minor important decisions about specifics of accessibility.
Web is full of sticky or fixed elements and they may add to usability for some users. But if we think about variety of different users we may quickly note the possible problems for them. Covering too much screen, covering important other elements, or even blocking users totally can be prevented with proper planning and testing. This article tries to map the problems as a first step to proper awareness.
Simple reflection – accessibility is about alternatives; giving users different possibilities and respecting their preferences and needs. It’s about making things that can be accessed in multiple different ways – alternatives.
Common effort, interdisciplinary competence and early dialog can be the only best practice for assuring the accessibility of the final product. If we leave that team members live in their own roles then we are almost surely to fail and get into situations where the issues on the end prevent launching accessible products and flood the team with issues. Cooperation and dialog are key!
Design, development and even search engines embraced the mobile first way of thinking we should probably also start to think about the accessibility from mobile first perspective. Maybe it really is time to think about digital accessibility from mobile first aspect as well.
The more I know about alternative text for images the more I understand the complexity of it. There are differences between users and content creators about decorative and informative image objectives and developers should never decide if image will be decorative or not. HTML standard includes a lot on this as well and should be read by more people for better accessibility and better web in general.
Time flies and this blog has now 100 posts. Counting posts does not count for much but I try to consistently write about accessibility to think out loud. I also tried to summarize some quite special thoughts about complexity and how accessibility must be a team effort to be successful. On the end I also added some stats…
I decided to try to make my own Google Voice Assistant action that will return quotes on accessibility, universal design and also quotes from famous and less famous people with disabilities on their digital experiences.
Vocal user interfaces come to my attention when playing around with my phones voice assistant. I treat screen-reader as a vocal user experience as well. They are not very related though and that came as a surprise for me. But voice assistants have giant impacts for everybody, not only from accessibility perspective but in general when thinking about humans interacting with computers.
I wanted to describe the importance of ARIA for mobile devices. Especially when we have to be careful with ARIA and maybe just accept the fact that native HTML element can be much better choice. Sometimes graphical design should embrace the limitations that styling native HTML elements bring.
Where to start as a developer or designer wanting to test with screen-reader? With basics, right – and maybe with mobile first. But do not underestimate real users – they might surprise you.
Every (front-end) developer should add screen-reader to their tools. Screen-reader experience can really help us make products more accessible and also be better at our coding. Combinations of screen-readers and browsers can get over complicated, so it is important to think if code we write is supported for majority.
Virtual Reality is quite exciting and should be more accessible also for people with disabilities. But what has to be done to make it more accessible. I try to scratch the surface of the subject and reflect on some possibilities that come to my mind after some limited experience with my VR headset.
Some thoughts about accessibility of three-dimensional web user interfaces and what are our options to cover user needs. HTML canvas can be enriched with either sibling DOM or fall-back markup and if we think of single-dimensional interfaces then we can also make three-dimensional interfaces accessible.
23th of June 2021 is the final step of Web Accessibility Directives mission to improve accessibility of web and native mobile. WCAG 2.1 applies for mobile as well, but there are some exceptions. At the same time I touch the importance of accessibility in our Covid / Corona pandemics situation.
Semantics is how things reflect structure and meaning and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) can change all that. So CSS can have huge impact on accessibility as well. Be mindful about it and forget about pixel perfect first – think user first, pixel second.
Accessibility for web and mobile seems to be very code-oriented, but it really starts much earlier – in the design phase.We should really shift accessibility left, on the whole picture – from A to Z. That also goes for design and initial product setup, not just developing!