Introduction:
Welcome to the latest edition of A11y (Accessibility) 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:
Spend at least one testing session a week only using your keyboard. Keyboard navigation is fundamental to a lot of accessibility supporting assistive technologies such as screen readers and different input devices like braille keyboards.
Building this simple step into your testing instantly changes your perceptions of user journeys
General:
Everybody loves comics, right? Well, I do and there are more moving online each year. Comica11y is an experiment in making an ‘all inclusive online comic reading experience’. The comic offers control to the reader and is engineered for screen readers. There are details about the challenges and detailed objectives too. This is something I hope can be a great resource to make comics inclusive.
Hot on the heels of last months tip about using emojis carefully comes this great dos and don’ts post from Easter Seals Blog. Blind author Beth Finke offers advice to make sure your message gets through to everyone such as, “Don’t put a call to action after the emoji.”
The agenda for axe-con 2022 in March next year is now live with the opening key note by the creator of the internet Tim Berners-Lee. The conference has over 100 speakers across 87 talks, split into 4 tracks and over 3 days. Check out full details via the link below.
https://www.deque.com/axe-con/schedule/
Compliance:
Taken from an AI (Artificial Intelligence) perspective Wired.com explains how a company relied on AI to solve their accessibility problems and wound up in court. The solution they employed was accessibility overlay ‘AccessiBe’ who were not a party to the lawsuit.
https://www.wired.com/story/company-tapped-ai-website-landed-court/
Technical:
The Web Almanac is a fantastic resource all round but the accessibility section combines technical information and statistics with great advice. Much like the WebAIM Million this long read offers website statistics such as, only 22% of mobile sites have passing colour contrast. Highly recommend reading or at least adding to your accessibility favourites.
https://almanac.httparchive.org/en/2021/accessibility
Disability:
Inviqa has an inclusive scenario generator which can be used in several ways such as making your user stories more inclusive or enhancing your personas. The generator take into consideration age, occupations, mental and physical states and employment and socio economic status too. Here’s an example; Yoko, 12 years old, would like to find friends whilst being in a wheelchair, living in a wealthy area and a YouTuber. Well worth checking out.
I’ve highlighted articles from Holly who has the website, Life of a Blind Girl before and this time she has written for Disability Horizons, an online lifestyle magazine. Her article, 8 misconceptions about visual impairment examines those while trying to offer the reality of the situation.
Tools:
PDFs are notoriously inaccessible and there are many tools out there offering remediation services. But how do you know which one to choose or even learn more about how to make yours accessible. Well now you have the opportunity to do both through this Common Look article comparing the different options out there. It begins by explaining PDF tags and how they help.
https://commonlook.com/pdf-accessibility-remediation-software-tools-review-detailed-comparison/