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.
Category: Practical A11y
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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.
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?
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.
Short introduction post on important subject of cognitive accessibility – especially the practical guidelines that can be found in latest study.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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!
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.
To claim that our product is accessible needs more than just WCAG audit that did not discover any fails. Real users, people with disabilities are the only one that can really reflect on the accessibility of our products. That’s why we should include them in all reasonable parts of our production processes. Otherwise we may think we deliver accessibility but the truth can be opposite.
Everybody seems to publish videos online and that is not so strange with modern mobile phones all around us. But to make a video accessible we need to invest some time and effort, otherwise we risk that some people will never get to our messages in the video. I try to summarize the basics and also provide some resources that can go beyond.
Inspired by others – I reflected on the origins of accessibility problems in design. It’s not so strange when we think that design is the implementation plan and if plan is not accessible then the final product will most certainly also not be accessible. Code, low-code or no-code alike.
W3c recently published Accessibility Maturity Model and I wanted to add some reflections of mine in this post. They refer to 4 maturity stages and I think there could even be 5 for some not so transparent organizations out there.
I try to summarize on the hard parts of accessibility as I detect them. Some parts of digital production are actually simpler to make accessible and some are not, so reflections on that may help you to invest resources correctly.
Sometimes people claim that accessibility is the responsibility of development and code. I disagree. It is a team effort and it can only succeed when whole team knows what to do. Content is king and if we start and end with content it can make the teams accessibility efforts much more effective.
You have probably encountered the “Skip to main content” link somewhere and maybe even thought that it is a requirement to conform to WCAG. Well it’s not. But I think you should use it anyway. Because it can literally prevent people to experience unneeded pain.
Automatic testing of software is brilliant. Saves a lot of time and effort, prevents problems soon and makes our products better. But when trying to automatically test accessibility we need to know about the challenges and problems before. Some tools may even produce wrong results and some tools may report everything is perfect when they can only test up to a third of criteria.
HTML semantics and assistive technologies support is way better than PDF’s. If you are a MAC user that needs to use a screen-reader you may be forced to experience the missing semantics of even most accessible PDF’s. And maybe it is time to move more PDF documents to HTML?
Accessibility is a cross-role responsibility and this also means that documenting it has to be a common task. Cooperation and common grounds makes the teams efforts much more effective and it can mean a big difference when relevant documentation clarifies also the minor important decisions about specifics of accessibility.
Web is full of sticky or fixed elements and they may add to usability for some users. But if we think about variety of different users we may quickly note the possible problems for them. Covering too much screen, covering important other elements, or even blocking users totally can be prevented with proper planning and testing. This article tries to map the problems as a first step to proper awareness.
The more I know about alternative text for images the more I understand the complexity of it. There are differences between users and content creators about decorative and informative image objectives and developers should never decide if image will be decorative or not. HTML standard includes a lot on this as well and should be read by more people for better accessibility and better web in general.
I decided to try to make my own Google Voice Assistant action that will return quotes on accessibility, universal design and also quotes from famous and less famous people with disabilities on their digital experiences.