Question of dealing with conflicts between aesthetics and accessibility comes up a lot and sometimes it’s easy to just let one side win and be done with it. I think that we need a cultural shift to have both of them.
Category: Principles
Latest posts:
I am a bit biased towards technical parts of accessibility, but when I studied EAA even more, I finally understand why it does not try to be technical.
Sometimes when I audit webpages and mobile apps I really wish that parts of WCAG AAA would just become AA, to improve the user experience and to make things better for more users.
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.
I don’t like the fact that EN 301 549 is provided in PDF format. It’s way simpler to process HTML. And when I did some parsing I figured out I could also check how exactly does EN 301 549 goes beyond WCAG for web and mobile applications. Quite a lot is the short answer.
After auditing some native mobile apps for accessibility I tried to understand the capabilities and possibilities of native mobile platforms for Android and iOS applications. In this post I try to reflect on the fact that making native mobile apps accessible can be much harder than when we try to make web accessible.
Another reflection on the business impacts of making things accessible. Investing in accessibility now will for sure make commercial advantage for us as people or companies. It’s not only the right thing to do, it also makes sense commercially.
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.
I am honored to be a protégé of such an amazing accessibility professional as Léonie Watson is. Besides being a nice person she really invested into her time in our sessions and I made quite a progress based on her feedback. This post is trying to describe how it all went and concludes with my recommendation to anybody – get yourself a mentor before you can become a mentor yourself.
Re-watching Uncle Bob’s Clean code videos made me think about ethics in digital production that is unfortunately not mainstream. Accessibility should for sure be a part of it and I reflected on both here in this post. A bit philosophical, but nevertheless important.
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.
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.
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.
This post is not your daily rant about not including accessibility into different online competitions – it is about why it really should be like that – we all deserve accessibility and there are no reasons why competitions should not add accessibility as one of key factors. It is beneficial for all!
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.
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!
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.
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!
Simple reflection – accessibility is about alternatives; giving users different possibilities and respecting their preferences and needs. It’s about making things that can be accessed in multiple different ways – alternatives.
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.
Time flies and this blog has now 100 posts. Counting posts does not count for much but I try to consistently write about accessibility to think out loud. I also tried to summarize some quite special thoughts about complexity and how accessibility must be a team effort to be successful. On the end I also added some stats…
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.
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.
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.
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.
Different automatic tools can produce different results. Accessibility conformance testing rules help a bit but there are still potential differences. And, again, automatic tools cover up to a portion when testing for WCAG success criteria, so please do test manually and with users to really make your products accessible
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.