TL;DR: Avoid setting heading levels greater than six (6). This applies whether using aria-level or the proposed headingstart HTML attribute. Use HTML <h#> elements whenever possible. ARIA The aria-level attribute, when applied to headings (or nodes with the heading role) lets authors set an integer value for a heading level.…
Yeah, that’s not exactly a helpful title. The relatively new Web Platform Baseline offering does not track browser support for accessibility features built into the web platform. If you need to understand whether browsers support accessibility features as your own base level set of requirements, for legal or other compliance…
The native HTML <select> is renowned for its styling limitations. Even with control over the closed state and trigger appearance, the options themselves are still defined primarily by the browser and the OS. While I think this is generally fine (preferred, even), the <selectlist> (nee <selectmenu>) hopes to change that.…
The Test Page The Code Testing Results Keyboard Screen Readers Voice Control, Forced Colors, Speed Media Queries: 20 December 2023 Audio Description: 20 December 2023 Wrap-up Browsers each provide built-in video players for the <video> element. Nearly four years ago Scott Vinkle wrote How accessible is the HTML video player?,…
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…
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…
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…
This post serves no purpose other than to demonstrate the fidelity of screen readers when announcing non-emoji Unicode characters when using default settings. There is no judgment on which is correct. This is simply for reference. I grabbed the following tweet and recorded it across common screen readers (WordPress ate…
Both Chrome and Firefox support XPath searches when in the DOM view of their dev tools. Because the browser cleans whatever HTML it encounters (closing tags, correcting nesting), XPath can operate on the code as XML. Simple checks like finding a unique ID value can result in multiple hits in…
Outline: Feature Queries Proprietary, or Internet Explorer Only Standards Track, or Edge Only Frankenquery’s Monster System Colors CSS2 System Color Keywords WHCM Proprietary Feature Query Color Mappings CSS4 System Color Keywords Browser Support Internet Explorer Legacy Edge (Ledgacy) Chromium Edge (Chromiedge) Firefox Chrome Examples Backgrounds Inline SVGs SVGs via <img>s…
The Browser Archive home page as captured on 13 October 1999. On August 18, 1999, we at evolt.org launched the Browser Archive. At launch browsers.evolt.org contained 80 different browsers. It started with my personal testing suite built up from 1996, and just kind of went from there. Those links point…
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…