Some reflections after two years. Progress is slow, but steady. Personally I would invest into automatic testing solutions to monitor some basics, but that’s probably not possible before stakeholders, politicians and organizations really understand the impacts.
Author: Bogdan Cerovac
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Website owners are responsible for use of third party widgets, plugins and more. Before using them they should check if they conform to WCAG, otherwise their site will not conform either. Checking for accessibility statement of the third party may reveal huge problems with their product’s future.
Another reflection on the business impacts of making things accessible. Investing in accessibility now will for sure make commercial advantage for us as people or companies. It’s not only the right thing to do, it also makes sense commercially.
Finding errors and failures is quite simple. Finding their solutions not so much. Audits should in my opinion provide with specific solutions that are not vague and are totally actionable. Otherwise we need to call in other experts to translate them.
Time flies, and I am WAS for two years now. Short reflection about the past and the future that WAS has for me.
As I enjoy my vacation I decided to write a bit more personal post, still related to accessibility, but no technical details.
We all reach out to third party solutions and we like it when they claim they are accessible. But please don’t just believe them – check that they really are conforming. And when they update – check again.
Sometimes it’s simple to make a feature with JavaScript but not so simple to make it consistent for all those screen-reader and browser combinations. In this post I describe how I tried to update some live regions and the order in the DOM was not respected. Solution was simple, but it’s easy to forget about it when it works visually.
I am honored to be a protégé of such an amazing accessibility professional as Léonie Watson is. Besides being a nice person she really invested into her time in our sessions and I made quite a progress based on her feedback. This post is trying to describe how it all went and concludes with my recommendation to anybody – get yourself a mentor before you can become a mentor yourself.
Mobile native applications are often with no headings. Sometimes even have visual headings but are missing on the semantics. Screen-reader users can and also like to navigate via headings, so we should be responsible and use them. They are supported on both iOS and Android.
It was not clear to me if WCAG 4.1.3 can be applied to native mobile applications. At least on both iOS and Android. So I did some research and came with the conclusion that we can and should or even must use status messages also on native mobile apps.
We are most probably failing a WCAG success criteria 1.4.10 Reflow because of CSS’s inability to fix word breaks for us. What can we do to allow grammatically correct word breaking when our browsers can’t help us yet?
Just a brief reflection on the business side of the accessibility equation that can easily be set on side.
European Accessibility Act will for sure have huge positive effects on the e-commerce, and I hope it will help also other sectors and small-businesses.
What are the most critical requirements for testing native mobile accessibility? What do we have to have for testing? Should we only test with phones? What about different operating system versions? This post will give you some basic hints.
Navigation between pages is so natural for us that we don’t even think about it. And obviously it can also be forgotten when using newer technologies like Single Page Applications. Although a decade old, some are still not really accessible as navigation is not announced to screen-reader users. Let’s check what works and maybe have a conclusion.
Re-watching Uncle Bob’s Clean code videos made me think about ethics in digital production that is unfortunately not mainstream. Accessibility should for sure be a part of it and I reflected on both here in this post. A bit philosophical, but nevertheless important.
Short introduction post on important subject of cognitive accessibility – especially the practical guidelines that can be found in latest study.
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?