A little knowledge is a dangerous thing proverb goes also for accessibility. When we are motivated to implement newly acquired knowledge after a training we can quickly start overusing techniques and can even make our product less accessible.
Category: Practical A11y
Latest posts:
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!
Brief reflection on 3 years of WAD in EU and short version of attending WAD anniversary event which was really worth attending.
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.
Sometimes best practices are passed as WCAG requirements and that can make accessibility more difficult for some people to implement. We need to understand what WCAG actually requires and what it does not before we try to impact other people.
Some brief thoughts on how to make a small business more accessible, at least digitally. Don’t take it as a project, it is a program, a journey.
Advertising is big money. Making your ads inaccessible is expensive. In this post I summarize some common accessibility issues that are present in online adverts.
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.
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.
Inert is still useful and although we are slowly getting native dialog we can still benefit from using inert when we don’t strictly use dialogs or modals.
European Accessibility Act is around the corner. 100 weeks is not a lot in terms of conformance and compliance. Especially considering banking, e-commerce and transport services that will be a part of EAA. What to do? Start now!
Just a quick brainstorm when checking a design wireframe for potential accessibility issues, finding low level problems that may be solved way earlier than we may think. Maybe even before designer became a designer and before developer became a developer?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I wanted to check for myself it ChatGPT can help delivering more accessible code. And after multiple trials I gave up. The reason for it’s confident but wrong example code is clear to me and when you read this post it will also be clear to you.
Once again a discussion I had on problems with headings after an accessibility audit. Can we get it right and can we have a sustainable solution? I believe so!
A post from fellow accessibility specialist made me think about why people think accessibility is difficult. I think that awareness, knowledge, ethics, involvement and responsibility can help a lot.
When developers discover ARIA and try to misuse or overuse it we get more problems than we may have before. It’s not just that, even if they do everything correctly we risk to have an inaccessible product due to missing support of theoretically great ARIA.
Please forget about automatic document outline and plan accordingly. Make it work for people and not for search engines. It’s once again a team effort – design, develop and content.
Writing a blog post on the 25th of December allows me to write about wishes. And one of them is to have better tools for accessibility auditing.
This post tries to describe what I would like to get from the tool. Realistically, noting too advanced.
After giving a talk about accessibility and discussing the lack of awareness I decided to reflect on some thoughts in this post.
Are we ready to use native HTML dialogs in production? As often – it depends. Please don’t take it against me but it really depends. Some users are still forced to use older browsers, polyfills seem to be problematic, so most often we are still stucked with ARIA based dialogs. For now.
Before you order your accessibility audit you should read this article of mine. I try to be objective and constructive and present the good and the bad, the strengths and the weaknesses of accessibility audits.
The journey from content creator to end user is quite long. At least in terms of different software that needs to deliver. And as we all know – software has bugs. And sometimes even so called features that can actually be called bugs as well. So please test and if we find a problem – report it, so that we improve the accessibility one step at a time.
Trying to set a baseline for making more accessible custom interactive components. Yes, you should refer to whole WCAG and I refer to it as well, but this can be used as a good baseline as well. Hope it can help somebody.