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Briefly on conflicts between aesthetics and accessibility requirements

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.

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What does aria-hidden=true actually do to interactive elements?

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.

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Welcome WCAG 2.2 and goodbye success criterion 4.1.1 Parsing

9 new success criteria and one less in WCAG 2.2. Removing 4.1.1 from WCAG 2.2 impacting WCAG 2.0 and WCAG 2.1 as well (can’t fail 4.1.1 anymore). Even if three new WCAG 2.2 success criteria are on level AAA I don’t see reasons to not implementing them as they bring much value!

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Web accessibility also benefits sustainability

Sustainability and accessibility are absolutely interconnected. Recent sustainability guidelines, although still in draft version, are quite often referring to accessibility, so I wanted to expose parts where accessibility is beneficial to sustainability.

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I will miss WCAG 4.1.1 a bit, but it’s retirement will allow us to focus on more important problems

I’ve learned that WCAG can’t be changed a lot and that only additions are allowed. Now I’ve read that WCAG 2.2 will have the 4.1.1 success criterion (parsing) removed. My first reaction was – why and how will we work with problems in HTML then? On the other hand we should probably be happy we can focus on other problems that are more related directly to accessibility.

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Can we already use native HTML dialog element in production?

Are we ready to use native HTML dialogs in production? As often – it depends. Please don’t take it against me but it really depends. Some users are still forced to use older browsers, polyfills seem to be problematic, so most often we are still stucked with ARIA based dialogs. For now.

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Browser’s accessibility tree and screen-readers speech log aren’t always sincere

Accessibility tree in browser and screen-reader’s speech logs are extremely valuable tools when we want to check how HTML, CSS and ARIA translate to assistive technologies like screen-readers, no doubt about that. But please make sure to go through to the end – do listen to your screen-readers and in different combinations with browsers. As sometimes that’s the only way to find out about real problems.

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How I imagine a modern automatic accessibility testing tool

What would I have in an automatic accessibility testing tool if I could have anything that is possible with today’s technology?
Well, I would start at the beginning – clear scope and known priorities is a start and sometimes we can’t really cover all that when we have to choose where we need to focus. Next, I would like to teach the tool, so that it will be more and more independent. And because I like to stand for my decisions – I would like to use the blockchain to prove my efforts and fixes. Words can be empty, deeds talk.

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Operating systems, browsers, screen-readers, automatic analysis tools can all have bugs that make accessibility even more difficult

The journey from content creator to end user is quite long. At least in terms of different software that needs to deliver. And as we all know – software has bugs. And sometimes even so called features that can actually be called bugs as well. So please test and if we find a problem – report it, so that we improve the accessibility one step at a time.

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2022 WebAIM’s Million report on accessibility – my comment

Some improvements can be detected and I also added some thoughts of mine about the parts that are not very obvious. Interestingly – e-commerce is almost worst – and that really is a surprise when we think about how much do they invest into ads and SEO, just to get some new users.

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Visual and semantic heading levels can be different – but…

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.

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Some common web accessibility issues caused by developers

Some accessibility issues originate in code. And when design is being recreated with code it may seem to work but when thinking about accessibility we may notice that it only works for some users and not for others. I’ve decided to describe some common accessibility fails that are on developers.

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External accessibility audits and how to act on them

External agency made an accessibility audit. It provided a lot of possible solutions. In this post I try to make it easier to act on this audit. Breaking results into responsibilities, then prioritizing the issues and finally estimating and fixing them can be one way of doing so.

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Online shop owners – don’t neglect accessibility and prepare for European Accessibility Act

If you own an online shop I really suggest that you make it as accessible as possible. European Accessibility Act will require it from you, but let’s rather think about getting more customers, non-discrimination of people with disabilities and better search engine optimization as the main drivers for making eCommerce accessible.