I’m a big fan of using automation in WCAG testing. I use bookmarklets, dev tools, browser features & reporting, and a pile of third-party products from assorted vendors. These save me time and effort, letting me focus on more tricky cases. But… Unfortunately, the marketing machines of some vendors seem…
In 2017 I wrote Tweaking Text Level Styles (terrible name in retrospect) and I made regular updates over the years. Stop reading it. Remove it from your bookmarks. Unlink it from your posts. Print it onto paper and then burn it. Demo <mark> <del> <ins> <s> Wrap-up The conclusions and…
Sometimes you run into a main landmark where you don’t expect one. Like Main Street USA in Hong Kong Disney. So you grab a snack in a diner that serves no hot dogs. You can buy little American flags in the heart of Hong Kong and clothes telling Hong Kong…
Eric tagged me into this chain letter of a post. From what I can glean, you are supposed to steal the headings and treat them as questions. Why did you start blogging in the first place? Three key reasons: So I wouldn’t have to keep repeating myself; to act as…
This post only covers my impressions and experiences from CSUNATC. Others probably had dramatically different experiences. Talk Types The talks seemed to fall into three broad categories this year: product pitches, vendor room sessions (which were product and service pitches), and ‘AI’ talks. Vendor Rooms For the most part, if…
I posted something on Mastodon that uses Unicode math symbols to produce fake bold and fake italic text. I used YayText.com to generate it, but I am not linking it because you I don’t want you to use it. I embedded the post, but you can go to it directly…
TL;DR: anyone promising you that a total solution to digital accessibility is coming, and they are the ones bringing it, may be lying. Background In 2016 I wrote Be Wary of Accessibility Guarantees from Vendors. At the time I was cautioning readers about libraries and frameworks and SaaS and so…
LLM-powered chatbots are here to stay. As a result, I am playing around with a disclaimer to recommend for clients. After all, if the LLM says that it’s fine to mix chlorine and ammonia to clean the sink, then that chatbot user needs to be told to probably confirm it…
You may have seen this as a thread on Mastodon (my primary social short-form platform) or on BlueSky. Imagine these as the opening to a series of conversations between a vendor or client or boss or PO or whomever and me. Variations on Real Life Conversations “We like the way…
In my post Brief Note on Figure and Figcaption Support I demonstrate how, when encountering a figure with a screen reader, you won’t hear everything announced at once: No screen reader combo treats the caption as the accessible name nor accessible description, not even for an image that lacks one.…
It does, actually. In Firefox. Sometimes. A major risk of using ARIA to define text content is it typically gets overlooked in translation. Automated translation services often do not capture it. Those who pay for localization services frequently miss content in ARIA attributes when sending text strings to localization vendors.…
I am not going to dive into the details of <figure> and <figcaption>. Go read Scott’s 2019 post How do you figure? for an overview. That said, since Scott’s post there has been movement on the AAPI mapping (partly by Scott). Specifically, the <figcaption> element should not provide the accName…