Early in 2017 I filed an issue against WAI-ARIA Authoring Practices (APG) requesting a change to the menu navigation pattern. Despite a great deal of feedback in agreement, it languished. In late 2017 I wrote Don’t Use ARIA Menu Roles for Site Nav and started actively campaigning against the APG…
Heading this off early: uniquity uniq·ui·ty; \ yüˈnikwətē, -wətē, -i \Uniqueness; quality of being unique. There is a place where accessibility practitioners hang out and try to out-do each other with niche knowledge of nuance. While loitering in one, a question came up about text fields that have the same…
Google engineers have proposed a new HTML element, <toast> or <std-toast>, that is a container for presenting brief or simple notifications to users. But of course it is not quite that straightforward. Backlash It is going to be impossible to extricate this proposal from the reactions it has garnered. So…
TL;DR: Regardless of what accessibility conformance level you target, try to ensure that interactive controls are at least 44 by 44 pixels in size. Links in blocks of text are exempt. Overview In real life there is typically both a visual and tactile component to an interface. You have to…
I am going to propose a way to increase the overall accessibility of the WordPress ecosystem. It requires acknowledging some mistakes and using those as the base for building a better platform. I long for a world where a metric for featuring #WordPress themes and plugins in the repo is…
I built this for me. An audience of one. A way to keep sharp the skills that I am not always able to use on a project. My requirements were simple: responsive (print, small screens), accessible (beyond screen readers), and kinda fun. Since it relies on a JSON data source…
Once major browsers started supporting <details> & <summary> developers immediately started to play with them to see what sorts of patterns they could enhance or replace. This is a good thing. Experimentation pushes boundaries, improves understanding. However, we need to be careful of christening this new-to-us interaction as the solution…
When a keyboard-only user or screen reader user comes to page that uses CSS to create a layout, there is a chance that what is on the screen does not match the flow of the page. In the posts HTML Source Order vs CSS Display Order and Source Order Matters…
Updated Intro Whether you use a <button> or <input type=”checkbox”> for your toggle depends on a few factors: Use <button> if: you can count on JavaScript being available, flipping the toggle has an immediate effect, the toggle will never have an indeterminate state. Go read Under-Engineered Toggles Too. Use <input…
Direct link in case the embed does not work. I also mentioned some resources at the end of my talk: How to Meet WCAG 2 (Quick Reference) Intopia Launches WCAG 2.1 Map Inclusive Design Principles Inclusive Design posters from Barclays Tweets Some people tweeted about my workshop. I also tweeted…
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…
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…