Inspired by others – I reflected on the origins of accessibility problems in design. It’s not so strange when we think that design is the implementation plan and if plan is not accessible then the final product will most certainly also not be accessible. Code, low-code or no-code alike.
Tag: ARIA
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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.
You have probably encountered the “Skip to main content” link somewhere and maybe even thought that it is a requirement to conform to WCAG. Well it’s not. But I think you should use it anyway. Because it can literally prevent people to experience unneeded pain.
Automatic testing of software is brilliant. Saves a lot of time and effort, prevents problems soon and makes our products better. But when trying to automatically test accessibility we need to know about the challenges and problems before. Some tools may even produce wrong results and some tools may report everything is perfect when they can only test up to a third of criteria.
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…
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.
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!
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.
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.
Some reflections on The WebAIM Million annual accessibility analysis. There is some improvement but we all need more empathy and knowledge.
Quality Assurance must get their hands on screen-readers and other assistive technologies on multiple platforms, besides understanding acceptance criteria for WCAG and really get the whole accessibility aspect.There is no other way. No shortcuts here.
It is possible that our website is 100% WCAG compliant and still not accessible to an assistive technology user. WCAG alone is not enough, we must test manually as well.
When in need for a custom widget / control er even basic site element – it is easier than ever before to just get it from the web or maybe even create one from scratch. This post tries to explain what has to be considered.
Defining testable conditions on multiple levels will make development and testing more effective. This is when acceptance criteria is useful.
Why are we not encouraged to use ARIA everywhere? Because it is a last option – if we are not able to find a native semantic element, or if we want to create something special, then we can use ARIA. But it should be used wisely!
Inspired by a YouTube video from Una Kravets and always knowing that aria reminded me of something I had to elaborate on that (and explain a small bit on dangers of aria as well)
Some reflections on my newly acquired Web Accessibility Specialist certification and a mention of Neuralink that will be demoed today and can have positive implications on accessibility as well. If used correctly.
I wanted to expose sweet points from the Making Facebook.com accessible to as many people as possible article that was published on 30th of July 2020 as it is an excellent example of continuous and from-start accessibility in my opinion and we should all implement at least some parts of it in our work-flows.
A lot is written on Continuous Delivery and Continuous Integration and I think they should also include accessibility. Maybe we should define Continuous Accessibility as a part of them as well.
They say that sometimes you can not see the forest for the trees. But in web development you really should think about the forest of multiple trees to understand how it connects.
Do not forget about keyboard. It is essential for accessible web-sites and web applications.