Here is the priority I follow when assigning an accessible name to a control: Native HTML techniques, aria-labelledby pointing at existing visible text, Visibly-hidden content that is still in the page, aria-label. Too often folks will grab ARIA first to provide an accessible name for a thing. Or they may…
As of my 28 January 2024 update at the end of this post, aria-label auto-translation support is seemingly as spotty as when I first wrote this post. It does, actually. Sometimes. One of the big risks of using ARIA to define text content is that it often gets overlooked in…
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…
Many of my clients over the years have relied on fields in tables. Sometimes a checkbox to select a row, sometimes text inputs to update information, sometimes buttons select something. Rarely are they interested in a block of label text above the field, and I cannot disagree with them. The…
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…
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…
Download a 3.6MB tagged PDF of my slides or try the embedded view if your browser displays PDF inline. The text in the slides is set in Atkinson Hyperlegible. The PDF is exported from PowerPoint, after confirming reading order and alternative text. The PDF itself has had no editing. Not…
TL;DR: Probably don’t use disclosure widgets in fieldsets. If you do it anyway, don’t put the trigger in the <legend>. Context With <details> / <summary>, recent support for the popover attribute, and the never-ending belief that a “clean” page means hiding content, there is a resurgence in stuffing useful content…
I am mis-using closed captions for a gag. The following video has an audio track and four sets of captions (for now?). Each set of captions is in English. Only one set of captions represents the spoken dialog, the other two represent dialog not in the video. The tracks are…