Spanned table headers are not well supported across screen readers. While you can visually style these all sorts of ways to make the spanning clear, I am focusing on the programmatic outcomes. Which essentially means how they are exposed to screen reader users. This post uses only HTML <table>s. It…
First, a very important qualifier — this does not represent how Braille display users experience the web. All this post does is show how to enable the Braille display emulators in JAWS and VoiceOver. This can be handy when testing issues reported by users and you do not have a…
TL;DR: Support for aria-readonly is nearly non-existent for the roles I tested. Should you need it, you cannot rely on it. You will be better off revising the pattern where you think you need it. For some background, the aria-readonly property: Indicates that the element is not editable, but is…
Now that it is a market differentiator to talk about accessibility in projects, that’s all many do — talk about it. In a sea of pop-dev noise, “accessibility” can be claimed with little risk someone will challenge it. If someone does, the response is often a fine balance between silence…
The slides for my talk are available as a
It was late 2020 when I last tested how browsers use CSS display properties to break the semantics of elements. I had been waiting for Safari to fix how it handles display: contents for four years now, and was excited when the announcement came in June. Then I started testing…
At the start of 2016 I wrote Internet Explorer Does Not Go Away Today because back then IE up to version 11 was being retired. But not Internet Explorer 11. I asked an AI (Neural Blender) to give me a picture of the Internet Explorer logo on fire. It’s almost…
I have spent a few years banging on about ensuring scrolling areas on a page are accessible to keyboard-only users. This is partly because the term “keyboard” maps to other input types that we distill to “keyboard” for ease of reference (speech input, sip-and-puff, on-screen keyboards, scanning software, etc.). When…
The proposed WCAG version 2.2 has gone through a bunch of revisions since I covered the first draft in 2020. One new success criterion that persisted is 2.5.8 Target Size (Minimum) at Level AA (its name changed from “Pointer Target Spacing”). For background, WCAG 2.1 introduced 2.5.5 Target Size, mandating…
I made some pointless things again. The First One See the Pen Best viewed in… by Adrian Roselli (@aardrian) on CodePen. A spinning box for each word is not exactly a compelling interface element, I admit, but I based it off this old tweet that was sitting around in a…
Keyboard interaction note for just one control from the entire panoply of HTML controls: A native <button> fires on key down when that key is Enter. If you hold down the Enter key, it continues to fire for as long you hold Enter (or something crashes). A native <button> fires…
If you have little experience with ARIA, screen readers, or testing in general, understanding accessible descriptions can be trickier than understanding accessible names (already confusing for many). I have written explanations so many times for clients and in fora that I opted to put this together so I maybe never…