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…
From the FTC on Friday: The Federal Trade Commission will require software provider accessiBe to pay $1 million to settle allegations that it misrepresented the ability of its AI-powered web accessibility tool to make any website compliant with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) for people with disabilities. FTC Order…
TL;DR: Description list support continues to be generally good (with VoiceOver still the outlier), even if you may not like how it is supported. For background, the <dl> has existed since HTML+, or 1993, when it was called definition list. In December 2022 I wrote Brief Note on Description List…
I got myself a coffee advent calendar and I have to admit it was more aspirational than anything. I don’t drink enough coffee. But the packaging is nice. Web developers around the world have for years given a nod to Saturnalia solstice Isaac Newton’s birthday Yule wassailing mummering end of…
It’s weird to me that after I urged everyone not to disable form controls, a bunch of them decided that making them read-only was somehow better. But here we are. What’s in the box? Photo by Michael Heiss, no edits, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0. HTML The readonly attribute is only allowed…