Under-Engineered Patterns for #a11yTOconf
The slides for my talk are available as a
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role=dice for #a11yTOgaming
I had the pleasure / terror of presenting a table-top RPG presentation at this year’s accessibility Toronto gaming (#a11yTOgaming) event. My 0riginal PowerPoint presentation, which includes my speaker notes / ignored script as well as the videos (79MB). Or grab the much smaller video-free tagged PDF (13.2MB). The background for…
Overlays Underwhelm at ID24
Owing to a last minute cancellation, I had the pleasure of presenting at Inclusive Design 24, a live streaming 24-hour solid conference. In the interest of full disclosure, I am also an organizer and a sponsor. I had to step away from hosting duties to give the talk and then…
Brief Note on Super- and Subscript Text
Thanks to a conversation on the A11y Slack, I ran desktop browsers and screen readers through a test to see how they announce content marked up as superscript and subscript. I spun up an old demo from mid-2018 for a quick test: See the Pen HTML Buddies: sub & sup…
‘Accessibility at the Edge’ W3C CG Is an Overlay Smoke Screen
Another post where I lay it all out in the title. What follows is why I am making this assertion (with a handy table of contents). Timeline 26 May 2022 at 10:58am ET 26 May 2022 at 7:56pm ET 27 May 2022 at 7:38pm ET 28 May 2022 at 5:04pm…
Conveying All-Caps Legal Text
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”…
FTC, Commercial Surveillance, and Overlays
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…
Brief Note on Calendar Tables
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…
AI-Generated Images from AI-Generated Alt Text
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…
Irrational Headings
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…
Brief Note on Dismissing Selects and Listboxen
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…
What Does X% of Issues Mean?
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…