The world wide web has officially lasted 30 consecutive years, which means it’s catching up to its parent, the Internet, which itself is bearing down on 50. That’s an important distinction. The Internet is not the web; it is the foundation on which the web was born. In honor of…
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) does a good job of providing supporting techniques to help reviewers determine if a specific case would violate a given Success Criterion (SC). WCAG 2.0, which became a recommendation at the end of 2008, has carried these techniques over to WCAG 2.1, finalized in…
HTML5 gives us form field validation for free. The problem is that the default messages browsers provide are not always useful and typically do not work with assistive technology. I made an example on CodePen that uses an email field (type=”email”), is required (required), and uses a pattern to restrict…
The pun in the title is that some people pronounce the a11y numeronym as “alley”. That makes the full title sound like uncanny valley, the concept of human-looking things seeming almost, but not quite, human and therefore creepy. In accessibility, the same thing can happen. Developers can try so hard…
Last week while whining about having accessibility contributions to FOSS projects dismissed, I had a Twitter conversation about when the same thing happens with clients. I have a method to deal with that, however, which I briefly outlined on Twitter. I promised to expand on it in a blog post,…
Underlines, the standard, built-in signifier of hyperlinks, the core feature of the web, are beautiful. This is objectively true. They are aesthetically one of the most delightful visual design elements ever created. They represent the ideal of a democratized information system. They are a frail monument to the worldwide reach…
Tobie Langel and I have launched a new site called a11y.reviews (spoken as Accessibility Reviews). Today if you want to identify if a tool, platform, service, resource, etc. is accessible you have to ask the broader community for its feedback. This does not scale. The goal of the site is…
Web Content Accessibility Guidelines Inclusive Design Principles Manage Expectations Wrap-up CSS Scrollbar Module (added 10 December 2021) Now that one of the most popular CSS resource sites on the innertubes has implemented styled scrollbars in the browser I think the time is right (or too late?) for me to try…