I was asked if I can issue ‘WCAG certificate’ for a website, so I decided to investigate what would that actually mean as we all know that sites and mobile apps are constantly evolving and changing and even if they conform to WCAG they may not the following day. What would then mean to issue a WCAG certified certificate and still be ethical and the right thing to do?
Tag: WCAG
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Why do status messages matter so much they deserve it’s own success criteria in the WCAG? Well, it is just a minimum – all users deserve to be informed when something important happens, also users of screen-readers and other assistive technologies.
What would I want from my Accessibility-as-a-Service provider? What would be the ideal here when we know that automatic testing is absolutely not enough? We must also get people as a part of the service – accessibility specialists and people with disabilities. And when done from start to end it is way more efficient compared to only using it at the end.
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.
European authorities published accessibility reports from multiple EU lands and I decided to read all of them and make short summary with my personal comment about them. A lot can be learned from their first auditing and there is a lot that can and need to be improved throughout Europe.
Online shopping must be more accessible and it must happen now. Pandemics, quarantines and isolation are for sure one of the strongest reasons, but if you are a shop owner in the EU you should also consider the legal part of it. There are for sure also returns of investment, but please do the right thing and stop discriminating people with disabilities!
First days of new year are perfect for a summarization of previous year – I like to call it retrospective. What I did for myself and also something I did for my employer and our customers… Happy new year!
To claim that our product is accessible needs more than just WCAG audit that did not discover any fails. Real users, people with disabilities are the only one that can really reflect on the accessibility of our products. That’s why we should include them in all reasonable parts of our production processes. Otherwise we may think we deliver accessibility but the truth can be opposite.
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.
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.
W3c recently published Accessibility Maturity Model and I wanted to add some reflections of mine in this post. They refer to 4 maturity stages and I think there could even be 5 for some not so transparent organizations out there.
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.
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.
Mental health awareness is important throughout the year but it does not hurt to have special days with focus on it as well. I try to reflect on the accessibility and it’s role for mental health. Neurodiversity and mental health are very interconnected, so when thinking about them in our accessibility efforts it can make some positive effect for all of us!
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.
Web is full of sticky or fixed elements and they may add to usability for some users. But if we think about variety of different users we may quickly note the possible problems for them. Covering too much screen, covering important other elements, or even blocking users totally can be prevented with proper planning and testing. This article tries to map the problems as a first step to proper awareness.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.