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ARIA role=”application” and mobile screen readers

There are some limited resources on ARIA role application, but I missed more information for mobile screen readers and just quickly checked the situation on Android and iPhone. It seems that support is not there, besides some small quirks. Be even more careful with role = application!

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Consider accessibility when using horizontally scrollable regions in webpages and apps

After doing an audit of a webpage ,where navigation require horizontal scrolling, I decided to test what does that pattern mean for people with disabilities. Longer story short – be careful, maybe it’s not worth it for critical components like navigation.

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Accessibility overlays often fail to improve accessibility

I would like that accessibility is the default, just there, without effort. Just fixed for all of us. But it’s not yet possible. Probably never will be. And when I try to be open minded and try to use a feature of accessibility overlay and it just fails, not one but two features, under two minutes, on an important page for people with disabilities, then I had to write about it. And even make a video of it.

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Welcome WCAG 2.2 and goodbye success criterion 4.1.1 Parsing

9 new success criteria and one less in WCAG 2.2. Removing 4.1.1 from WCAG 2.2 impacting WCAG 2.0 and WCAG 2.1 as well (can’t fail 4.1.1 anymore). Even if three new WCAG 2.2 success criteria are on level AAA I don’t see reasons to not implementing them as they bring much value!

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WCAG may seem perfectionistic, but accessibility isn’t

Concentrating on WCAG alone can feel like accessibility is always binary. When thinking about all the success criteria of the WCAG we can quickly conclude that there is not a single medium sized website in the world that conforms totally. A reflection on perfectionism, conformance and reality.

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WCAG 2.2 brings more bad news for sticky elements and more good news for users

Keyboard only users (or users of keyboard based assistive technologies) depend on seeing focus indications at all times and if they can’t see them, they are left to guessing where they are. With soon-to-come WCAG 2.2 focus must be at least partially visible at all times, simply put.

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Online business and accessibility best practices

I try to reflect on practical best practices to make an online business more accessible. Most of advice is very tactical and some is a bit strategical. Hope at least some of it can improve the accessibility of your business.

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Accessibility of municipal websites in Norway after Web Accessibility Directive – usage of accessibility overlays

Are accessibility overlays common on Norwegian municipality websites? Short answer is no, luckily. But when they are they really messed up the site. Not only accessibility-wise but also on mobile devices / smaller screens / when zooming in.

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Accessibility of municipal websites in Norway after Web Accessibility Directive – parallel analysis by another actor – summary

I am not the only one concerned about accessibility and it seems that I also had similar timing, methodology and results. I didn’t go all in with the crawling of absolutely everything and I didn’t test the documents as they did. So that’s why I made a short summary to enrich my own analysis.

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Accessibility of municipal websites in Norway after Web Accessibility Directive – more on automatic accessibility tests

This is the fourth part in a series and in this post I expand the automatic analysis report to cover approximately 50 webpages under each of 356 Norwegian municipalities – 17837 URLs to be precise.
The general outcome is quite interesting and I was surprised to see some very positive trends as well.

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Accessibility of municipal websites in Norway after Web Accessibility Directive – automatic accessibility tests

Accessibility statements can claim all sorts of things but we should test as much as we can to establish the reality. The simplest and quickest way to do that is to use automatic tests. In this post I reflect on the results of automatic tests of homepages for all Norwegian municipalities. You will be surprised as I was.

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Accessibility of municipal websites in Norway after Web Accessibility Directive – statements analysis

Accessibility statements required by Web Accessibility Directive are quite efficient indicators of websites accessibility, when sites are audited by professionals with some experiences. We don’t have better data than this at the moment, so let’s process this a bit and then dive into numbers and findings.

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Accessibility of municipal websites in Norway after Web Accessibility Directive – introduction

What is the state of accessibility of municipal websites in Norway? Now we can get some data based on their official accessibility statements. While doing so we can also draw some conclusions, but this post is only the first part of a series of posts on the subject and talks mainly about motivation, methodology and preparation.

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Some thoughts about fifth WebAIM’s Million evaluation

I love WebAIMs Million, but I need to point some things out. Some people may come to wrong conclusions after reading parts of the report and I hope I can improve that. I also think I know the reason and the solution about the still very poor state of accessibility.