Automated accessibility testing tools are rightly wary of giving false positives. You don’t want to flag something as an error in a test only to have the team rebuild an entire thing for no reason (never mind the risk of introducing errors). We know automated accessibility testing tools can really…
Thanks to a comment on my post #accessiBe Will Get You Sued, I found UserWay had taken the meat of that post, re-cast as its own effort, and was using it as a marketing effort to frame its overlay as a better product than accessiBe. Excerpts from the post that…
Whether you call them sentence forms, narrative forms, fill-in-the-blank forms, or Mad Libs forms, you are probably describing a form where the fields are interspersed within words in a sentence. Unlike more traditional forms, laid out with simple pairings of labels and fields, these forms are meant to be read…
Though JS-free fixed table row and column headers have been possible for quite some time, Safari’s and Chrome’s recent fixes got some people pretty excited. Enough that folks are copying code samples in whole, without always paying attention to necessary considerations. That same excited demo included other CSS properties that…
TL;DR: Stop using the word pop-up. Instead choose a term that accurately describes the control you want. I encourage you to read my post Stop Using ‘Drop-down’, which provides the set-up for this post. Along with another term I would prefer everyone stopped using. As you embark on a design,…
The CSS3 logo as a head atop a torso with its arms folded across its chest. I am a big proponent of the First Rule of ARIA (don’t use ARIA). But ARIA brings a lot to the table that HTML does not, such as complex widgets and state information that…
This post expands on what I covered in my April 2021 post, Sortable Table Columns. You may want to read that first to understand the broader challenges and techniques for making a table sortable by one column at a time. That last statement is what matters here. ARIA 1.1 says…
Form ever follows function. Louis Sullivan Louis Sullivan, the father of the modern skyscraper, espoused this belief throughout his work. He recognized that the purpose of the building, when entering a place with no prior art, had to drive how it would look. With both the technology and audience providing…
Both Chrome and Firefox support XPath searches when in the DOM view of their dev tools. Because the browser cleans whatever HTML it encounters (closing tags, correcting nesting), XPath can operate on the code as XML. Simple checks like finding a unique ID value can result in multiple hits in…
An accessible sortable table is not necessarily the same as a usable sortable table. Outline: Basics Let The User Know This Thing Has Sorted Screen Reader Announcement Sort Arrows Column Background Column Background via <col> Let The User Know This Thing Sorts SVGs Layout Windows High Contrast Mode Screen Readers…
Others in this sorta-series: Under-Engineered Custom Radio Buttons and Checkboxen Under-Engineered Toggles Under-Engineered Toggles Too Under-Engineered Text Boxen I am still confounded how many developers and designers see a <select> and immediately reach for a library or framework to re-create the features from the ground up. Though, frankly, I am…
Thanks to a tweet from UCL Department of Mathematics, I am one of the many people who stumbled across Cistercian numerals and fell down the rabbit hole. To over-simplify, they are single glyphs that can each represent a number from 1 to 9,999 that were developed by Cistercian monks to…