Introduction:
I hereby dub the first Tuesday of the month as “Accessibility Tuesday”, so;
Welcome to the fourth 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.
Apologies I’m a couple of days late this month as we had a couple of days away celebrating our 31st wedding anniversary.
General:
As more social media sites are offering the opportunity to add descriptions to images, knowing how to describe them is a skill everyone can use. Alternative text or Alt-text describes pictures to those using screen readers, some of which won’t be able to see the picture or image at all.
But it is doubly important for websites. As the article points out, ‘The 2019 WebAIM Million analysis found that missing alt-text was the second most common accessibility failing.’
https://bighack.org/how-to-write-better-alt-text-descriptions-for-accessibility/
The brilliant people at WebAIM.org (Web Accessibility In Mind) have released the results of their Screen Reader User Survey. This is the 9th time they have run this since 2009. The survey covers a wide range of questions from who is using screen readers (79% who are blind) to which screen readers are being used.
Some of the data is fascinating like the decline of Internet Explorer over the past 12 years and the rise of Chrome as the number one browser used with screen readers. Highly recommended as a read particularly for anyone doing or thinking of testing with screen readers.
https://webaim.org/projects/screenreadersurvey9/
Compliance:
I suppose you could describe this article as outlining false compliance. Accessibility Overlays are sadly becoming more popular but they cause many more problems than the very minor ones they solve. They are often inaccessible themselves, think keyboard traps, unannounced elements etc. etc.
This excellent piece by Denis Boudreau is a 6 minute read of facts, information and sublime summaries of why they are a problem and the genuine harm they are doing. Including those getting sued who ‘thought’ they were compliant!
https://uxdesign.cc/the-single-biggest-threat-to-the-future-of-digital-accessibility
Technical:
In this longer but very interesting article from earlier this year, intuit highlight the importance of understanding the Accessibility Tree. The Accessibility Tree is used by all operating systems to power assistive technology and, as highlighted in the article, ‘replace the existing UI for applications, as well as translating operations performed by the user into something that the application understands.’
Even for the non technical reader this is clear and informative.
Comboboxes and autocomplete can have some tricky complications for assistive technologies (AT) like screen readers. Patrick H. Lauke has written up his ‘bug-bears’ with current ARIA Practices and offers some examples.
https://github.com/w3c/aria-practices/issues/1954
Disability:
This excellent recent article by Kristen Shinohara, Assistant Professor of Computing and Information Sciences, Rochester Institute of Technology and Garreth Tigwell, Assistant Professor of Computing and Information Sciences, Rochester Institute of Technology touches on including people with disabilities in tech teams.
We should all know the research by now that more diverse teams build better technologies, due to their ability to uncover more unconscious biases. Including people with disabilities means you have users for whom using, for example, assistive technology, is their everyday experience. As the article says, ‘Observing people is good; their participation is better’. Highly recommended read.
I’m learning every day but can sometimes make mistakes with language and the impacts words can have, whether intentional or not. Some time ago I stopped using the term, ‘colour blind’ and changed to ‘colour vision deficiency’. I was told that for those that are blind the comparison is ableist.
Doing some research I came across this piece about ableist words and terms to avoid. This does come with a warning that to discuss this it does contain slurs. This is very well written
https://www.autistichoya.com/p/ableist-words-and-terms-to-avoid.html
Tools:
Not quite a tool but this replacement for the Skip to Main link any page with a header menu or content should have is really interesting. From the team at PayPal this ‘SkipTo’ script creates a drop-down menu consisting of the links to important landmarks and headings on a given web page identified by the author. Able to be configured to offer useful feedback to people this has very many applications on websites or web based applications. I’m told this may not play nicely with React but investigations are ongoing.
If you missed my #A11yWithAdy tweet, you can read all about them here; https://twitter.com/A11y_Ady/SkipLinks
https://github.com/paypal/skipto/blob/main/README.md