Short introduction post on important subject of cognitive accessibility – especially the practical guidelines that can be found in latest study.
Year: 2022
Latest posts:
Building on first Slovenian Accessibility Awareness Day and on the first official Web Accessibility Directive reports from Slovenian public sector I made the Second Slovenian Accessibility Awareness Day. Still and always a work in progress, but please read the post and then if you wish also the reports to get some clues about the state of accessibility in Slovenia.
A short post about my Global Accessibility Awareness Day 2022 contribution – online escape room for mobile screen-readers called Voice-Back.
What was the motivation, intention, implementation and goal behind voice-back.net.
Please try it out if you want and let me know how it went.
Global Accessibility Awareness Day number 11 is soon here. It’s my third one and this time I have a bit different plans for it. An online mobile screen-reader app, analysis of Slovenian accessibility and ask me anything session instead of webinar.
Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) is hot and getting more (deserved) attention. Please do not forget about accessibility when trying to implement DEI. It’s at least as important as all other aspects that can make our world a better, more inclusive, place. Start with basics, we do not need to become experts at once. It needs to be a part of our deliveries otherwise we discriminate.
Minimum viable product that is not accessible is not really minimum. And then also the WCAG on level AA is the minimum, a baseline. When we reflect over those two facts – we must agree that MVP must at minimum conform to WCAG 2.1 on level AA. If this MVP will run in EU’s public sector even WCAG 2.1 on level AA alone is not the minimum.
I get it, you have to release a new website next week and your client just asked you if it is accessible, because it has to be, right? What do you do? Your favorite search engine helps you at once and solution is a widget install away. Wrong! Awareness with no knowledge is dangerous! Please read and understand – and try to build on the knowledge part as well.
How come Web Content Accessibility Guidelines still surprise some people? They are not something new. They are extremely important. Maybe some of reasons lie in education, missing role models, ignorance of awards and maybe even in the open source itself. Some thoughts of mine that try to reflect about this.
This post is not your daily rant about not including accessibility into different online competitions – it is about why it really should be like that – we all deserve accessibility and there are no reasons why competitions should not add accessibility as one of key factors. It is beneficial for all!
Some improvements can be detected and I also added some thoughts of mine about the parts that are not very obvious. Interestingly – e-commerce is almost worst – and that really is a surprise when we think about how much do they invest into ads and SEO, just to get some new users.
Is it okay to give a heading level 2 the style of level 3 but keep the semantics of level 2. Well yes – but as often with accessibility – it depends. It’s not up to developers to set it in stone and it is for designers and content providers to decide when appropriate. Content is once again crucial.
How do you test for something that can be only possible in certain conditions? Well, best way to do this kind of testing is to ask developers and others that were involved in the feature specifications.
Some accessibility issues originate in code. And when design is being recreated with code it may seem to work but when thinking about accessibility we may notice that it only works for some users and not for others. I’ve decided to describe some common accessibility fails that are on developers.
I was asked if I can issue “WCAG certificate” for a website, so I decided to investigate what would that actually mean as we all know that sites and mobile apps are constantly evolving and changing and even if they conform to WCAG they may not the following day. What would then mean to issue a WCAG certified certificate and still be ethical and the right thing to do?
Why do status messages matter so much they deserve it’s own success criteria in the WCAG? Well, it is just a minimum – all users deserve to be informed when something important happens, also users of screen-readers and other assistive technologies.
What would I want from my Accessibility-as-a-Service provider? What would be the ideal here when we know that automatic testing is absolutely not enough? We must also get people as a part of the service – accessibility specialists and people with disabilities. And when done from start to end it is way more efficient compared to only using it at the end.
Need for quicker digital product deliveries connected with remote work due to pandemics and the soon-coming European Accessibility Act will most certainly make a gap in the need for accessibility specialists. Current situation of certified accessibility professionals by the IAAP may indicate which countries are more prepared and which less. The fact remains that we need more accessibility specialists and we need them now!
External agency made an accessibility audit. It provided a lot of possible solutions. In this post I try to make it easier to act on this audit. Breaking results into responsibilities, then prioritizing the issues and finally estimating and fixing them can be one way of doing so.
European authorities published accessibility reports from multiple EU lands and I decided to read all of them and make short summary with my personal comment about them. A lot can be learned from their first auditing and there is a lot that can and need to be improved throughout Europe.
Authentication will also be a part of WCAG, at least it is planned to be an level AA success criterion in the WCAG version 2.2 when it will be officially published. Nevertheless – I think standardization of authentication will benefit a lot of people.
Online shopping must be more accessible and it must happen now. Pandemics, quarantines and isolation are for sure one of the strongest reasons, but if you are a shop owner in the EU you should also consider the legal part of it. There are for sure also returns of investment, but please do the right thing and stop discriminating people with disabilities!
It’s smart to have a plan before making changes and this post is sketching my plans to improve accessibility knowledge and also help others in 2022.
First days of new year are perfect for a summarization of previous year – I like to call it retrospective. What I did for myself and also something I did for my employer and our customers… Happy new year!