32 items tagged “accessibility”
2024
Cally: Accessibility statement (via) Cally is a neat new open source date (and date range) picker Web Component by Nick Williams.
It’s framework agnostic and weighs less than 9KB grilled, but the best feature is this detailed page of documentation covering its accessibility story, including how it was tested—in JAWS, NVDA and VoiceOver.
I’d love to see other open source JavaScript libraries follow this example. # 2nd April 2024, 7:38 pm
Guidepup. I’ve been hoping to find something like this for years. Guidepup is “a screen reader driver for test automation”—you can use it to automate both VoiceOver on macOS and NVDA on Windows, and it can both drive the screen reader for automated tests and even produce a video at the end of the test.
Also available: @guidepup/playwright, providing integration with the Playwright browser automation testing framework.
I’d love to see open source JavaScript libraries both use something like this for their testing and publish videos of the tests to demonstrate how they work in these common screen readers. # 14th March 2024, 4:07 am
2023
Ice Cubes GPT-4 prompts. The Ice Cubes open source Mastodon app recently grew a very good “describe this image” feature to help people add alt text to their images. I had a dig around in their repo and it turns out they’re using GPT-4 Vision for this (and regular GPT-4 for other features), passing the image with this prompt:
“What’s in this image? Be brief, it’s for image alt description on a social network. Don’t write in the first person.” # 6th December 2023, 7:38 pm
New Default: Underlined Links for Improved Accessibility (GitHub Blog). “By default, links within text blocks on GitHub are now underlined. This ensures links are easily distinguishable from surrounding text.” # 19th October 2023, 4:19 pm
You can stop using user-scalable=no and maximum-scale=1 in viewport meta tags now. Luke Plant points out that your meta viewport tag should stick to just “width=device-width, initial-scale=1” these days—the user-scalable=no and maximum-scale=1 attributes are no longer necessary, and have a negative impact on accessibility, especially for Android users. # 4th August 2023, 11:41 pm
The anatomy of visually-hidden (via) James Edwards provides a detailed breakdown of the current recommended CSS for hiding content while keeping it available for assistive technologies in the browser accessibility and render trees. Lots of accumulated tricks and screenreader special cases in this. # 11th February 2023, 12:37 am
2022
WebAIM guide to using iOS VoiceOver to evaluate web accessibility (via) I asked for pointers on learning to use VoiceOver on my iPhone for accessibility testing today and Matt Hobbs pointed me to this tutorial from the WebAIM group at Utah State University. # 24th April 2022, 7:35 pm
Weeknotes: Distracted by Playwright
My goal for this week was to unblock progress on Datasette by finally finishing the dash encoding implementation I described last week. I was getting close, and then I got very distracted by Playwright.
[... 892 words]2021
A Complete Guide To Accessible Front-End Components. I’m so excited about this article: it brings together an absolute wealth of resources on accessible front-end components, including many existing component implementations that are accessible out of the box. Date pickers, autocomplete widgets, modals, menus—all sorts of things that I’ve been dragging my heels on implementing because I didn’t fully understand their accessibility implications. # 23rd March 2021, 1:06 am
2019
Using the HTML lang attribute (via) TIL the HTML lang attribute is used by screen readers to understand how to provide the correct accent and pronunciation. # 18th April 2019, 9:09 pm
2018
If you wrap your main content – that is, the stuff that isn’t navigation, logo and main header etc – in a <main> tag, a screen reader user can jump immediately to it using a keyboard shortcut. Imagine how useful that is – they don’t have to listen to all the content before it, or tab through it to get to the main meat of your page.
— Bruce Lawson # 19th December 2018, 1:07 pm
2017
How technology helped a blind athlete run free at the New York Marathon. Fascinating piece on technology to help blind people better navigate the world—combing GPS and chest-mounted ultrasonic sonar. # 6th November 2017, 4:58 pm
Skip the title text! Nobody uses them – they don’t work on touch screens and on desktop they require that the user hovers for a while over an image, which nobody does. Also, adding a title-text makes some screen readers both read the title-text and the alt-text, which becomes redundant.
— Daniel Göransson # 6th November 2017, 4:56 pm
Alt-texts: The Ultimate Guide. By Daniel Göransson, a web developer with vision impairment who uses a screen reader. This is the best, most practical guide to writing image alt text I’ve seen. Just one of the neat tips contained within: consider ending your alt text in a period, so the screen user knows to pause. # 6th November 2017, 4:54 pm
2010
My First Week with the iPhone. A blind user describes the experience of using VoiceOver on the iPhone, including the joy of discovering the Color Identifier app which speaks the names of colours picked up by the iPhone’s camera. “ I used color cues to find my pumpkin plants, by looking for the green among the brown and stone. I spent ten minutes looking at my pumpkin plants, with their leaves of green and lemon-ginger.” # 3rd October 2010, 12:20 pm
2009
Accessibility and Degradation in Cappuccino. Ross Boucher from 280 North responds to Drew McLellan. # 26th February 2009, 9:39 pm
The Cost of Accessibility. Drew McLellan comments on the seemingly inevitable march towards JavaScript dependent applications, and argues that JavaScript frameworks such as Cappuccino have a duty to integrate accessibility in to their core. # 25th February 2009, 10:31 pm
2008
Accessibility Experiment. Joe Walker asks what would happen if we threw away the idea of serving the same accessible site to every user and instead tried building specific versions aimed at different disabilities. # 22nd September 2008, 9:29 am
Capital Radio’s London Guide. Worth pointing out: the search / map interface on this page is one of the best examples of progressive enhancement I’ve ever seen. Try disabling JavaScript and see what happens. It seems like most developers just can’t be bothered with this kind of attention to detail these days, which disappoints me. # 29th August 2008, 1:48 am
Microformats and accessibility: the soap opera that never ends. “Be sure to tune in next week, when we’ll drown a leading accessibility expert to see if she’s a witch.” # 29th June 2008, 8:44 am
Removing Microformats from bbc.co.uk/programmes. “Until these issues are resolved the BBC semantic markup standards have been updated to prevent the use of non-human-readable text in abbreviations.” # 23rd June 2008, 9:04 pm
2007
google-axsjax (via) “The AxsJAX framework can inject accessibility enhancements into existing Web 2.0 applications using any of several standard Web techniques”—including bookmarklets and Greasemonkey. The enhancements conform to W3C ARIA, supported by Firefox 2.0 and later. # 14th November 2007, 5:18 pm
Why Accessibility? Because It’s Our Job! “A chef must care about health, a builder must care about safety, and we must care about accessibility.” # 16th October 2007, 10:06 am
Ignorance and inspiration. I’m pretty gobsmacked at the levels of ignorance about web accessibility out there—it’s not that hard people! I’m obviously more out of touch with mainstream developers than I thought; I was under the impression that people had generally got the message. # 15th October 2007, 10:47 pm
Google Maps, HTML version. Google’s mostly undocumented accessible version of Google Maps. Robin Christopherson demonstrated this yesterday at FOWA. # 4th October 2007, 9:31 am
The longdesc lottery. Mark Pilgrim is now writing for the WHATWG blog. Here he makes the case for replacing the longdesc attribute with a better solution, based on ten years of developer ignorance and misuse. As always with that site, check the comments for a microcosm of the larger debate. # 14th September 2007, 11:44 am
html4all. New mailing list / advocacy group focusing on accessibility issues relevant to HTML 5. This is something that the core HTML 5 group have taken a lot of criticism for, although it’s unfair to say that they don’t care about accessibility (they are however challenging a lot of sacred cows). # 14th September 2007, 11:35 am
I’ve actually been using the latest version of JAWS recently, as part of my work on HTML5. From a usability point of view it is possibly the worst software I have ever used. I’m still horrified at how bad the accessibility situation is. All this time I’ve been hearing people worried about whether or not Web pages have longdesc attributes specified or whatnot, when in fact the biggest problems facing blind users are so much more fundamental as to make image-related issues seem almost trivial in comparison.
— Ian Hickson # 4th September 2007, 12:27 pm
Why the Alt Attribute May Be Omitted. “The benefit of requiring the alt attribute to be omitted, rather than simply requiring the empty value, is that it makes a clear distinction between an image that has no alternate text (such as an iconic or graphical representation of the surrounding text) and an image that is a critical part of the content, but for which not alt text is available.” # 25th August 2007, 1:11 pm
WCAG Samurai. Anonymous Samurai, headed up by Joe Clark, publish their errata for WCAG 1.0 (with two independent peer reviews). Recommended as a better alternative to WGAC 2.0. # 8th June 2007, 5:56 am