I received a brief question about Web Accessibility in Norway and if it is different from the EU and decided to write a short post as an answer.
Tag: WCAG
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A post from fellow accessibility specialist made me think about why people think accessibility is difficult. I think that awareness, knowledge, ethics, involvement and responsibility can help a lot.
In 2023 we got some updates to Norwegian accessibility legislation and I try to summarize the newest situation in this short post.
Private sector should embrace accessibility statements and feedback mechanisms. Starting with measuring accessibility in processes and products and then documenting it in public while offering feedback is the best way to go.
Please forget about automatic document outline and plan accordingly. Make it work for people and not for search engines. It’s once again a team effort – design, develop and content.
After auditing some native mobile apps for accessibility I tried to understand the capabilities and possibilities of native mobile platforms for Android and iOS applications. In this post I try to reflect on the fact that making native mobile apps accessible can be much harder than when we try to make web accessible.
Being busy with accessibility audits because everybody want’s to make their accessibility statements made me think about usefulness of them. When is an usability statement useful? Hint – it’s not about how good your Lighthouse scores are. It’s about how you can help real people with real problems.
Looking back at 2022 I can say it was not bad, not bad at all. Incredible experiences, knowledge getting and sharing, contributing to open source, starting my own company, and being invited as a professional head of an newly started institute.
Writing a blog post on the 25th of December allows me to write about wishes. And one of them is to have better tools for accessibility auditing.
This post tries to describe what I would like to get from the tool. Realistically, noting too advanced.
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.
After giving a talk about accessibility and discussing the lack of awareness I decided to reflect on some thoughts in this post.
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.
In this blog post I go into details behind automatic accessibility testing and how I don’t really trust any accessibility scores such tools provide.
It all drills down to inability of automatic tools to pass WCAG success criteria and limited ability of them to fail some. Manual testing is the only real way to really know about state of accessibility.
Attended web performance conference (performance.now()) and found some thoughts about similarities with accessibility. Also made a simple proof of concept for a time to interactive metrics for screen-readers and other assistive technologies.
Before you order your accessibility audit you should read this article of mine. I try to be objective and constructive and present the good and the bad, the strengths and the weaknesses of accessibility audits.
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.
I had to fail an Android app in a recent WCAG audit because it’s expand/collapse components didn’t have the semantics. On the review I got asked about possible solutions and here you go – hope it will help somebody make accordions on Android more accessible.
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.
Website owners are responsible for use of third party widgets, plugins and more. Before using them they should check if they conform to WCAG, otherwise their site will not conform either. Checking for accessibility statement of the third party may reveal huge problems with their product’s future.
Another reflection on the business impacts of making things accessible. Investing in accessibility now will for sure make commercial advantage for us as people or companies. It’s not only the right thing to do, it also makes sense commercially.
Finding errors and failures is quite simple. Finding their solutions not so much. Audits should in my opinion provide with specific solutions that are not vague and are totally actionable. Otherwise we need to call in other experts to translate them.
Time flies, and I am WAS for two years now. Short reflection about the past and the future that WAS has for me.
As I enjoy my vacation I decided to write a bit more personal post, still related to accessibility, but no technical details.
We all reach out to third party solutions and we like it when they claim they are accessible. But please don’t just believe them – check that they really are conforming. And when they update – check again.
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.
It was not clear to me if WCAG 4.1.3 can be applied to native mobile applications. At least on both iOS and Android. So I did some research and came with the conclusion that we can and should or even must use status messages also on native mobile apps.
We are most probably failing a WCAG success criteria 1.4.10 Reflow because of CSS’s inability to fix word breaks for us. What can we do to allow grammatically correct word breaking when our browsers can’t help us yet?
What are the most critical requirements for testing native mobile accessibility? What do we have to have for testing? Should we only test with phones? What about different operating system versions? This post will give you some basic hints.
Short introduction post on important subject of cognitive accessibility – especially the practical guidelines that can be found in latest study.
Building on first Slovenian Accessibility Awareness Day and on the first official Web Accessibility Directive reports from Slovenian public sector I made the Second Slovenian Accessibility Awareness Day. Still and always a work in progress, but please read the post and then if you wish also the reports to get some clues about the state of accessibility in Slovenia.