Introduction:
I hereby dub the first Tuesday of the month as “Accessibility Tuesday”, so;
Welcome to the second a11y with Ady. I hope you enjoy it and find something useful and I’m happy to hear any feedback or thoughts or anything you would like to hear more about from the world of accessibility.
General:
This new course by Sara Soueidan is targeted for devs and designers but I think there will be some good stuff for testers too. I subscribed for updates and am excited to see more information.
https://practical-accessibility.today/
If you haven’t heard of the accessibility rules podcast you are missing out. These are great for learning about the people who are working to make the web a more accessible place for everyone. Podcasts are from 5 to 50 minutes so there’s something for all schedules. Here’s the ‘about’ from host Nicolas Steenhout.
There is a lot of information about how to make the web accessible. There isn’t so much information about the people working to make the web accessible. Over the years that I’ve been involved with web accessibility, I have met a lot of very interesting people. I wanted to learn more about them, and meet new people involved in one way or another with web accessibility.
Compliance:
Regulations came into force on 23 September 2018 which say that all public sector websites and mobile apps must:
meet accessibility standards
publish an accessibility statement
But even if you are not a public sector website or app there’s no reason you can’t follow the guidance given in this article from the UK Government. There’s some great tips and lots of information so if your company doesn’t have an accessibility statement this could be a great way to start the conversation on accessibility.
Technical:
An accessible sortable table is not necessarily the same as a usable sortable table. So says Adrian Roselli in this long but interesting piece. I can’t summarise this better than he did so here’s the introduction to see if it interests you.
“WCAG offers some guidance on what to do and ARIA provides attributes to expose the states to screen readers. But I have found that bringing it all together can frustrate teams, particularly when factoring in browser support, screen reader heuristics, and lack of experience in testing. Hopefully this post can make some of that a bit less daunting, if only by giving you some ideas to borrow or avoid.
If you are here to read about sortable rows, you are on our own.”
https://adrianroselli.com/2021/04/sortable-table-columns.html
Covering a range of topics as you can see below this post from Modern CSS is a gold mine of tips and information.
This post will cover a range of topics:
Focus Visibility
Focus vs. Source Order
Desktop Zoom and Reflow
Sizing Interactive Targets
Respecting Color and Contrast Settings
Accessibility Learning Resources
https://moderncss.dev/modern-css-upgrades-to-improve-accessibility/
Disability:
The World Health Organisation regularly updates its information on disability statistics and did so at the end of last year. I feel it is important to remember or be reminded of how many people you could be excluding if you don’t consider accessibility part of your project.
Over 1 billion people are estimated to live with some form of disability. This corresponds to about 15% of the world’s population, with up to 190 million (3.8%) people aged 15 years and older having significant difficulties in functioning, often requiring healthcare services. The number of people living with disability is increasing, in part due to ageing populations and an increase in chronic health conditions.
https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/disability-and-health
This is something that more companies should be considering. Cleanlogic is a beauty brand who have considered their visually impaired customers and are now including braille on their packaging.
https://www.tpgi.com/beauty-company-cleanlogic-adds-braille-to-packages/