I need your help. Legal documents are common on the web. Each site that has a Terms of Service written in impenetrable and indecipherable legalese, like this sentence, delights in that complexity to dissuade users from reading it and realizing just what they are giving up. “Am”, “add”, and “it”…
August 22, 2022: FTC’s Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (ANPR) is live as of today. You can share your public comments at Trade Regulation Rule on Commercial Surveillance and Data Security until Friday, October 21, 2022. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission on August 11, 2022 announced it is exploring rules…
If you build calendars on the web and abbreviate the days in the column headings (you do use column headings, yeah?), this is how it sounds to a JAWS user. Sorry, your browser doesn’t support embedded videos, but don’t worry, you can download it. The caption file is also available…
Dear sighted reader, I want you to read this post without looking at the images. Each has been hidden in a disclosure. Instead, read the alternative text I provide and visualize how it may look. Then read the automatically generated alternative text, and try to visualize it then. Consider how…
For years developers have been confused about, fought over, ignored advice on, and generally mis-treated headings. It has bordered on irrational. But let’s look at some actual irrational headings. <hφ> <hφ> corresponds to a heading at roughly level 1.618033988749…. This represents the Golden Ratio and is handy for identifying a…
Native controls can be different from their roled-up ARIA equivalents in a variety of ways. For example, an expanded native HTML <select> on mobile behaves differently when the dismiss gesture is used than when the same gesture is used with an expanded ARIA listbox. Using Android with TalkBack, a down-then-left…
I ran a highly scientific and well-scoped Twitter poll (yes, sarcasm) to ask a question that has been in the back of my head for some time: When you see a claim that an automated accessibility testing tool finds X% of issues, what do you believe the word ‘issues’ means…
It was late 2020 when I last tested how browsers use CSS display properties to break the semantics of elements. I had been waiting for Safari to fix how it handles display: contents for four years now, and was excited when the announcement came in June. Then I started testing…
It’s 2022 and people are still afraid to use <fieldset> and <legend>. I understand the layout challenges can be frustrating, but swapping to an ARIA group role will result in a more inaccessible experience. A Solution Try this: <fieldset> <legend>Choose</legend> <div aria-hidden=”true”>Choose</div> […] </fieldset> legend:not(:focus):not(:active) { position: absolute; overflow: hidden;…
At the start of 2016 I wrote Internet Explorer Does Not Go Away Today because back then IE up to version 11 was being retired. But not Internet Explorer 11. I asked an AI (Neural Blender) to give me a picture of the Internet Explorer logo on fire. It’s almost…
I have spent a few years banging on about ensuring scrolling areas on a page are accessible to keyboard-only users. This is partly because the term “keyboard” maps to other input types that we distill to “keyboard” for ease of reference (speech input, sip-and-puff, on-screen keyboards, scanning software, etc.). When…
For context on the title, working backward from the end, GAAD is Global Accessibility Awareness Day. Its purpose, as explained at accessibility.day, is to get everyone talking, thinking and learning about digital access/inclusion and people with different disabilities. A11yship is a play on the numeronym for accessibility (a11y) and the…