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.
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Common effort, interdisciplinary competence and early dialog can be the only best practice for assuring the accessibility of the final product. If we leave that team members live in their own roles then we are almost surely to fail and get into situations where the issues on the end prevent launching accessible products and flood the team with issues. Cooperation and dialog are key!
Design, development and even search engines embraced the mobile first way of thinking we should probably also start to think about the accessibility from mobile first perspective. Maybe it really is time to think about digital accessibility from mobile first aspect as well.
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.
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.
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.
Virtual Reality is quite exciting and should be more accessible also for people with disabilities. But what has to be done to make it more accessible. I try to scratch the surface of the subject and reflect on some possibilities that come to my mind after some limited experience with my VR headset.
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.
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!
European Accessibility Act became law in 2019 but it will be adopted in 2022. This will add benefits of web accessibility directive also for selected parts of private sector. E-commerce accessibility efforts will benefit all of us, that’s for sure.
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.
Some reflections on The WebAIM Million annual accessibility analysis. There is some improvement but we all need more empathy and knowledge.
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
axe-hackathon video is now live and I decided to transcribe my presentation’s questions and answers regarding aXeSiA and publish the feedback I got from the committee as well.
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.
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
Not really surprisingly – aXeSiA did not won axe-hackathon. And I never dreamed that it will. It was just an experiment for me personally. But this will not mean that aXeSiA is retiring – I will make it a tool I can use often. And a tool I can really tweak as I need and like. Congratulation to other projects and especially Inclusiville. If I had the time I would be happy to work on all other projects as well as they are really good.
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?