People starting with accessibility can often get a bit biased perception and focus mainly on screen readers. I believe it has to do with the guidelines.
Category: Promoting accessibility
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2025 is the year of European Accessibility Act. But we can establish that it will help with global accessibility, not only European.
Is it just me or is it weird to require and encourage the use of standard and at the same time hide them behind paywalls and even make them inaccessible?
This is a summary for my Universal Design 2024 (UD2024) conference contribution, where I was using parts of EN 301 549 and WCAG to check how (in)accessible are iOS and Android mobile applications from 4 largest Norwegian banks.
European public sector websites and mobile apps are required to have feedback mechanism. I believe that such feedback helps any kind of organization, even single person businesses.
I lead a project to manually test 20 Slovenian e-commerce websites and wrote an article about it, called (In)Accessibility of Slovenian E-commerce the Year Before the European Accessibility Act.
Time flies and after four years of directive we can reflect a bit more on the positive effects beyond public sector.
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.
Focusing on single channel alone is not enough, how to make sure accessibility is implemented throughout or channels? Leadership needs to lead!
Don’t get too concerned about the differences between WCAG on levels A and AA and instead use the energy to go beyond and implement AAA.
I did some work with conversion rate optimization and I couldn’t help myself thinking about how accessibility impacts conversion.
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.
Benchmarking of accessibility of different e-government digital services and how well do different countries do is a start, but beware!
W3C Accessibility Guidelines just got a major update. Still a draft, but I love the brainstorming potentials of the newly added guidelines and outcomes. Was the release date an coincidence?
Second Slovenian Accessibility Awareness Day was quite a success, my contribution this time was a manual accessibility audit of crucial WCAG success criteria of larger e-commerces, supported by a team from a11y.si
Quarter of a century later and we still don’t have enough awareness, support, knowledge, buy-in for accessibility. It is improving, but slowly, we need even more advocates.
Personal reflection about my encounter with web and accessibility, how I was ignorant of it as well and how I think we can’t be ignorant any more.
I feel that design is too focused on the visual parts and therefore the burden on non-visual design falls on developers. What can we do to improve this? To fill the gaps?
I try to open my mind and reflect on some possibilities that would maybe, perhaps, make accessibility overlays viable solutions. Then I quickly find the downsides and don’t change my mind about them…
I would like that accessibility is the default, just there, without effort. Just fixed for all of us. But it’s not yet possible. Probably never will be. And when I try to be open minded and try to use a feature of accessibility overlay and it just fails, not one but two features, under two minutes, on an important page for people with disabilities, then I had to write about it. And even make a video of it.
Happy to present my accessibility awareness building article at the DIGIN 2023 conference, organized by European Center for Accessibility (AccessibleEU). Short overview of other contributions and a thought about how this professional event could be even better.
My first academic article called General Strategies for Improving Accessibility of E-commerce was accepted on a Slovenian Digital Inclusion conference. It was an interesting experience writing it and in this post I reflect on some important things.
I just received mail from IAAP that my certification is prolonged based on my activities that generated enough Continuing Accessibility Education Credits (CAECs). I like that we need not only to pass the exam but to also remain active to maintain it. There are some downsides of certifications, but still way more positive effects in my opinion.
4 years went fast. A small self-reflection about the blog and a bit about the future of it.
Found an interesting study that should encourage business owners to do something about poor accessibility of their websites and mobile apps. Hopefully somebody will think about how much people their business is potentially missing.
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!
Shifting left, that is considering accessibility earliest possible, should be a concept in our school system as well. Basics of accessibility thought earlier in our lives is probably the only sustainable way to make our societies more inclusive and our products and services more accessible.
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?
We finally made an official Global Accessibility Awareness Day in Slovenia, and I am proud that I was a part of it and even had two presentations. It was amazing to meet a lot of people from different organizations connected to accessibility and to greet people that I cooperate with in-person for the first time.