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.
Category: Future of A11y
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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.
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.
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.
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!
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!
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.
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.
European Accessibility Act became law in 2019 but it will be adopted in 2022. This will add benefits of web accessibility directive also for selected parts of private sector. E-commerce accessibility efforts will benefit all of us, that’s for sure.
I’ve seen a lot of discussions on the subject of accessibility overlays that are trying to improve or even guarantee to fix all accessibility issues of a webpage they are installed on. It sounds perfect. You install a script and all your problems go away. But – is it too good to be true?
When taking care of accessibility you are actually doing your future self a favor. Or maybe your parents, grandparents or even children!
Fresh news from the Web Accessibility Initiative about the brand new Web Content Accessibility Guidelines that will actually cover much more than just web and mobile this time. Augmented and virtual reality, Internet of things, wearables and beyond are a part of our daily life, so they must also be accessible!
Night before Christmas – and besides all the usual wishes – I also wish a more accessible web!
Today is a big day for accessibility in the European Union and beyond. Still long to the ultimate goal but an important milestone.
I wanted to expose sweet points from the Making Facebook.com accessible to as many people as possible article that was published on 30th of July 2020 as it is an excellent example of continuous and from-start accessibility in my opinion and we should all implement at least some parts of it in our work-flows.
I believe all users should have the focus outline visible, but not everybody agrees with me. And there is a new CSS pseudo selector on the horizon – :focus-visible that is somehow connected.
At first glance not very much, but when we research the details and difficulties of some user groups then it is not difficult to understand that content must be readable to be understood.
Wouldn’t it be nice if computer would just make a perfect alternative text for us when we include the image? While there are some services promising this – they should be manually checked and corrected! But in the future…