2025 is the year of European Accessibility Act. But we can establish that it will help with global accessibility, not only European.
Posts
Authentication is often a burden to many different groups of users, but for people depending on assistive technologies it can be a total barrier. What can we do to improve that?
Tables are sometimes critical for understanding, and even if HTML supports quite complex tables we should keep them as simple as possible.
You connect your physical keyboard to an Android device and start pressing the tab key. And then shift tab. And sometimes – you circle around the UI but can not reach all interactive elements. Is this a WCAG 2.1.1 failure? Maybe it is, maybe you need to try harder…
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.
Web Content Accessibility Guidelines touch keyboard accessibility in a couple of success criteria. It’s essential for your native app to support keyboard interactions for it to be accessible. But how?
Grouping is not an exact science, but all designers and developers touching native mobile applications need to be aware of the simplification possibilities it can bring.
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.
Naming is one of the most difficult and enduring challenges in software engineering, and it is obvious that it’s also a giant problem in accessibility. How can you help?
Native mobile applications are often more focused and with that – less noisy for users (and I meant that visually and non-visually). But platform choices can lead to inevitable inaccessibility as some abstractions lack support.
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.
We need to be aware of the limitation of the tools to be able to use them properly and to prevent any bias.
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!
Dear leader, this is a letter to you. If you lead people, you need to lead accessibility.Do not just delegate it. You will thank me later.
AI is a fact. Some say it will improve accessibility, and I hope it will, but please consider the facts and new regulation.
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.
EAA goes beyond technical accessibility. It’s reference to Design for All is a well planned strategical motivator for culture change!
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!
Whenever you test web accessibility you need to consider all the website variants based on all media queries. This can be vital for your time usage estimates!
Sometimes I see complex web components copied to native mobile applications and often they are the cause of accessibility issues.
Any help to make native mobile application accessibility clearer is welcome. We really need to know more to make apps more accessible.
If people treat EAA as yet another compliance thing I think they are missing the greater picture, and probably also greater business.
Bogdan – can you give us an example of a website that conforms to WCAG / is accessible? A popular question with a less popular answer.
Everybody knows that we must not use aria-hidden on interactive elements. But why is that a problem? I decided to check for myself, so that I can explain it better the next time I will be asked.