Introduction:
Welcome to the latest edition of A11y with Ady. I hope you enjoy it and find something useful. I’m happy to hear any feedback or thoughts or anything you would like to hear more about from the world of accessibility.
Tip of the Month:
As a new feature I’m going to include one tip each month. This time it is links.
Each link needs a description so its purpose can be determined. Rather than ‘here’ or ‘click here’ or 'I've even seen ‘link’ amongst other similar useless descriptions. Consider how links can be included or post the whole URL. For example; instead of; ‘You can learn more about Essentials here’ with ‘here’ being the link, try’ ‘You can learn more about Essentials here’ You don’t have to do anything different but you can do it better.
General:
While 98% of homepages still contain accessibility errors there are some strides being made by major corporations. This five minute read by Rosemary Musachio for Ruh Global IMPACT highlights some of those wins.
https://www.ruhglobal.com/the-state-of-accessibility-in-major-corporations/
Life of a Blind Girl by Award-winning disability blogger and writer Holly is a great blog. With lots of tips for making your social media more accessible this post from 2018 is as relevant today as it was when she wrote it.
I normally try not to have more than a couple of items per category each month but this was too good to wait to share. Gareth Ford Williams asks the question, have we been approaching UX Accessibility all wrong? In this long but insightful piece he examines if the guidelines we follow dehumanise people and suggests 10 obstacles, rather than impairments, to think about. Obstacles such as Vision Reliance. 80% of people watch online videos without audio. Read the rest here.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/ux-accessibility-gareth-ford-williams/
Compliance:
One of the reasons people feel intimidated by the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) is the sheer volume of pages on W3.org. Finding good explanations is great for helping people understand their intention and purpose. This Get Stark article explains what the different levels are for and what the contrast ratios actually mean. There are also some great links at the end.
https://www.getstark.co/blog/accessible-contrast-ratios-and-a-levels-explained/
Technical:
Deque.com has a whole section dedicated to A11y for Developers amongst other great content. This article called, ARIA Spec for the Uninitiated: Part 1, in a great introduction to ARIA (Accessible Rich Internet Applications) which are attributes that can be used to make content more visible to users of assistive technologies such as screen readers. The first of 3 parts, the article introduces the 5 rules of ARIA and discusses some of the dangers of incorrect use.
https://www.deque.com/blog/aria-spec-for-the-uninitiated-part-1/
Most people have a favourite font but have you considered how legible it is to others? Particularly those with reduced or low vision. This 10 minute video explains all about Atkinson Hyperlegible and the design work that went into it. Now I’m not validating all their claims and they are not the first to try to combine aesthetics and accessibility but where available, such as Google Docs, it is free. In fact I’m writing this edition in it and I can say, I like it. Like everything else when it comes down to it this may be better for some and worse for others. Why not have a look for yourself.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wjE5eHLICzc
Disability:
Andrew Wilshere is a designer with the most common kind of colour vision deficiency (CVD), red–green or deuteranopia. He explains some common patterns that cause issues for people with CVD.
In her article Restricted Entry Kate Morris, Accessibility Champion for Deloitte, explains the parallels between 70’s culture and modern websites that choose not to be accessible.
https://kate-morris-new.medium.com/restricted-entry-2084483073de
Tools:
This piece from LinkedIn’s engineering team is about how they use automation to detect ‘low hanging fruit’ in new features they are building and to detect regressions in existing ones. It goes into the different tools they use and explain how their continuous integrations are blocked if any issues are found.
https://engineering.linkedin.com/blog/2020/automated-accessibility-testing
WebAIM’s Web Evaluation Tool (WAVE) is now available in Microsoft Edge so if you work with that browser you can get the benefit it brings. There’s nothing to read on this one but there is an introduction video on WAVE.