Introduction:
I hereby dub the first Tuesday of the month as “Accessibility Tuesday”, so;
Welcome to the latest edition of 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:
The article Five ways to include d/Deaf users in your designs by Rachele DiTullio, an accessibility engineer and a front-end developer. Her piece covers ways to consider d/Deaf people. Some top tips in this that apply to many situations.
The term D/deaf is used throughout higher education and research to describe students who are Deaf (sign language users) and deaf (who are hard of hearing but who have English as their first language and may lipread and/or use hearing aids).
https://www.tpgi.com/five-ways-to-include-d-deaf-users-in-your-designs/
Compliance:
Want to get more familiar with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) but don’t know where to start? How about a daily explanation of them to your inbox? Sign up using the link below.
Technical:
Hiding content is always a challenge. Who are you hiding it from? Everyone? Or should screen reader users be able to find it? Lots of questions pretty much every time.
In this excellent post Kitty Giraudel, a frontend developer focused on accessibility, runs through a host of ways explaining which are and are not accessible.
https://kittygiraudel.com/2021/02/17/hiding-content-responsibly/
Disability:
From the Accessibility in Government blog, this is a longer read about invisible disabilities. Although a recent post the story is from December 2019 so is office based. They conducted an experiment to see how people perceive invisible disabilities and they also talked about how biases can impact us.
The elephant in the room is well worth the read.
Being an olympian is a dream of many but only a few get to go. Fewer still win medals and you have to be special to win six. Becca Meyers had three gold medals to defend in Tokyo but she didn’t get there. As one of the very few deaf blind athletes she needs people to help her navigate strange places. The organisers said no to any support so instead of defending her titles she will be at home. Covid has had many impacts but when there are hundreds of people due at the Paralympics surely a couple more would not have made that much difference? It would have made a huge difference to Becca.
Tools:
Rian Rietveld is an authority in the field of web accessibility. For many years now, she has performed accessibility audits and shared her knowledge and skills by providing training for developers, website owners, and website editors. In this excellent piece she goes through scenarios for automated testing during development. The best way to get early feedback. But remember, while this is super cool, automation can only detect approx 30% of a11y issues. So keep testing.
https://www.a11y-collective.com/blog/automated-accessibility-testing-a-few-scenarios/