I did some work with conversion rate optimization and I couldn’t help myself thinking about how accessibility impacts conversion.
Tag: Screen-reader
Latest posts:
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.
There are some limited resources on ARIA role application, but I missed more information for mobile screen readers and just quickly checked the situation on Android and iPhone. It seems that support is not there, besides some small quirks. Be even more careful with role = application!
4 years went fast. A small self-reflection about the blog and a bit about the future of it.
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.
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.
Trying to set a baseline for making more accessible custom interactive components. Yes, you should refer to whole WCAG and I refer to it as well, but this can be used as a good baseline as well. Hope it can help somebody.
Sometimes it’s simple to make a feature with JavaScript but not so simple to make it consistent for all those screen-reader and browser combinations. In this post I describe how I tried to update some live regions and the order in the DOM was not respected. Solution was simple, but it’s easy to forget about it when it works visually.
Mobile native applications are often with no headings. Sometimes even have visual headings but are missing on the semantics. Screen-reader users can and also like to navigate via headings, so we should be responsible and use them. They are supported on both iOS and Android.
Navigation between pages is so natural for us that we don’t even think about it. And obviously it can also be forgotten when using newer technologies like Single Page Applications. Although a decade old, some are still not really accessible as navigation is not announced to screen-reader users. Let’s check what works and maybe have a conclusion.
Global Accessibility Awareness Day number 11 is soon here. It’s my third one and this time I have a bit different plans for it. An online mobile screen-reader app, analysis of Slovenian accessibility and ask me anything session instead of webinar.
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.
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.
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.
Everybody seems to publish videos online and that is not so strange with modern mobile phones all around us. But to make a video accessible we need to invest some time and effort, otherwise we risk that some people will never get to our messages in the video. I try to summarize the basics and also provide some resources that can go beyond.
I try to summarize on the hard parts of accessibility as I detect them. Some parts of digital production are actually simpler to make accessible and some are not, so reflections on that may help you to invest resources correctly.
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.
Accessibility is a cross-role responsibility and this also means that documenting it has to be a common task. Cooperation and common grounds makes the teams efforts much more effective and it can mean a big difference when relevant documentation clarifies also the minor important decisions about specifics of accessibility.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
2020 was a special year and not only negative, it was especially positive for the accessibility, both for the world and for me as well.
A link should navigate and a button should do something is the basic idea. Semantics will be rewarded with usability and even search engines will like it, so why break the pattern.