Many of my clients try to reduce the number of controls on a screen by replacing them with single controls that change their name based on their purpose (what they unironically call reducing complexity). For example, presenting a download button that also acts as its own progress indicator and completion…
This is why you never go to the (locally- and independently-owned) grocery store on an empty stomach. Web developers around the world have celebrated Saturnalia solstice Isaac Newton’s birthday Christmas with advent calendars covering web-related topics. As a result, you may recognize some of the ones listed below. Every year…
I had this post queued up for Halloween because, come on, skeletons, and then life did its thing and now it is a … Thanksgiving post? Many skeleton patterns do a poor job presenting themselves to screen reader users in any meaningful way. They often stuff aria-busy into their widget,…
Let’s establish something first — auto-generated captions are a problem. They almost guarantee a WCAG failure and can leave users more confused (or offended) than when they started. YouTube creates the transcript from the closed captions of a video (the text that overlays the video, as opposed to burned-in or…
I have written a bunch about responsive tables. Maybe too much. I keep trying to give developers the information they need to make informed decisions — ARIA attributes, screen reader & browser pairing results, bugs, and so on. I have spread things out over years of posts. I have filed…
Update In early July 2022 I re-tested these to see how the results shaped up after nearly two years and at least one promise: It’s Mid-2022 and Browsers (Mostly Safari) Still Break Accessibility via Display Properties If the title is not clear, one browser stands out in failing to address…
As of December 2024, you should prefer using <img> for icons and the like, but for non-interactive decorative contexts that don’t need auto-translation, then alternative text on CSS generated content can get the job done. Even if Safari does some interesting things with it. Relying on images that come from…
Creating an accessible dialog on the web is trickier than it should be. Lack of support for the <dialog> element, the need for fundraisers to get inert into WebKit, inconsistent support for the ARIA dialog role, and other annoyances make them problematic. Scott O’Hara has spent a few years covering…
This is a slightly extended version of my Twitter thread. As the W3C has embarked on a full web property rebuild, its vendor (Studio24) indirectly announced earlier this month that it had dropped WordPress from consideration as a CMS. WPTavern took issue with this yesterday, and Studio24 responded today, (politely)…
3 January 2025: This post is out of date. Read my post Updated Brief Note on Description List Support for the most recent results of testing. The <dl> has existed since HTML+, or 1993, when it was called definition list. VoiceOver on iOS has existed since 2009, when it was…
Update, 15 September 2020: Microsoft put together a more formal announcement at Introducing Source Order Viewer in the Microsoft Edge DevTools. It has some video examples and instructions to enable it. Edge 86 has introduced a feature that shows the source order of a page. You can read more about…
Visually and functionally sortable column headers on tables are straightforward (I have a post on that coming soon). However, making them accessible can be a bit frustrating. To clarify, making them accessible to screen readers is frustrating. I wrote the post I promised in the opening: Sortable Table Columns There…