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.
Category: Principles
Latest posts:
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.