I wanted to describe the importance of ARIA for mobile devices. Especially when we have to be careful with ARIA and maybe just accept the fact that native HTML element can be much better choice. Sometimes graphical design should embrace the limitations that styling native HTML elements bring.
Category: Practical A11y
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Where to start as a developer or designer wanting to test with screen-reader? With basics, right – and maybe with mobile first. But do not underestimate real users – they might surprise you.
Every (front-end) developer should add screen-reader to their tools. Screen-reader experience can really help us make products more accessible and also be better at our coding. Combinations of screen-readers and browsers can get over complicated, so it is important to think if code we write is supported for majority.
23th of June 2021 is the final step of Web Accessibility Directives mission to improve accessibility of web and native mobile. WCAG 2.1 applies for mobile as well, but there are some exceptions. At the same time I touch the importance of accessibility in our Covid / Corona pandemics situation.
Semantics is how things reflect structure and meaning and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) can change all that. So CSS can have huge impact on accessibility as well. Be mindful about it and forget about pixel perfect first – think user first, pixel second.
Accessibility for web and mobile seems to be very code-oriented, but it really starts much earlier – in the design phase.We should really shift accessibility left, on the whole picture – from A to Z. That also goes for design and initial product setup, not just developing!
I organized an accessibility workshop for our front-end and full-stack developers, user interface and user experience designers and others involved in digital production. This post will concentrate on screen-reader (SR) users way of navigation because it may surprise non-screen-reader users quite a lot.
Stakeholder mandate and approved budget is key for proper accessibility integration that every company involved in digital production needs. Here are some thoughts of mine about the practicalities.
Some people can treat an image as decorative and therefore skip the alternative text, but there are others that may treat same image in same context as more than just decoration. Maybe it is best to just add text for images that are potentially decorative and then let users decide for them selves.
20th of May 2021 is Global Accessibility Awareness Day and I wanted to contribute by analyzing state of web accessibility on Slovenian web pages. We can therefore say the first ever contribution to Slovenian Accessibility Awareness Day.
Project management have the power to really add to better deliveries and scope management. So it must be natural for project managers to also treat accessibility as a first class citizen, always in scope and always a part of definition of done
Automatic tests can help a bit. WCAG evaluation methodology provides a good start for test focus. And if we add page popularity scoring and simple page complexity scoring, then we can really focus on the potentially difficult pages in our manual testing efforts.
aXeSiA – my open source contribution to accessibility testing and axe-hackathon. We all like to use browser extensions to test the pages but aXeSiA makes our work easier if we want to automate it.
Animation can enrich the content, sometimes content is animation, and sometimes animation is preventing users to understand your content or even giving users a really hard time or in some cases even make them sick. So please be responsible with animation, and most importantly – let user control it.
We remember the rule for alternative text on decorative images, right. But is it really so clear what an decorative image is. Sometimes SEO wants us to have alternative text for images that do not directly add to the information. Should we do it for the bots or should we save time for screen-reader users? It depends. As always…
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?
At the end of the day – an email is just an HTML. But also has plain text version baked into it. And is still using tables for positioning, chances are. So here are some thoughts on how to make them accessible.
Passion for accessibility and empathy helps a lot, but it do comes down to systematic integration if we want that our organization delivers accessible deliveries and products.
Not everybody can or want to use their apps in a single predefined screen orientation. It should be a matter of preference and choice. That is accessibility as well. And we even have it as an WCAG Success Criteria. And yes – it should also be applied to native mobile devices.
Quality Assurance must get their hands on screen-readers and other assistive technologies on multiple platforms, besides understanding acceptance criteria for WCAG and really get the whole accessibility aspect.There is no other way. No shortcuts here.
Extremely valuable documentation that reveals some interesting points about future of Web Accessibility Directive monitoring methods, tools and also some less clarified reporting matters. The accessibility statement automatic analysis will most certainly also have a central role and it is worth following on the Accessibility Conformance Testing rules that are the engine of all automatic tools out there.
After some practical accessibility statement preparation work I decided to describe some thoughts of mine on the best practices that can be useful for it.
A link should navigate and a button should do something is the basic idea. Semantics will be rewarded with usability and even search engines will like it, so why break the pattern.
Just a short explanation to all the developers out there that may not understand the need for skip to content links.
When in need for a custom widget / control er even basic site element – it is easier than ever before to just get it from the web or maybe even create one from scratch. This post tries to explain what has to be considered.
Scaling down web browser is not enough. We should really test with physical devices and with at least Android and iOS based devices. UI and UX tests are important but so is testing accessibility with mobile screen-readers.
Defining testable conditions on multiple levels will make development and testing more effective. This is when acceptance criteria is useful.
Accessibility team as a team of members of other teams that are motivated to take a proactive role in their primary team – so that all teams can really implement accessibility efforts coherently.
Why are we not encouraged to use ARIA everywhere? Because it is a last option – if we are not able to find a native semantic element, or if we want to create something special, then we can use ARIA. But it should be used wisely!
There are still some myths out there about what we can and can not do and there are also some best practices around use of headings. Please do use them is my advice, but it is not a thing for compliance and SEO itself. It is more about usability.