TL;DR: You probably don’t need to name that landmark. The Ngong Ping Village tourist trap on Hong Kong’s Lantau Island. All the pricey tourist spots have visible named landmarks on the map, but the ones people generally care about (bathrooms, food, that lovely tea house) are not. The accompanying tactile…
I ran across a survey from Tilburg University on the experiences and perspectives of image describers. It asked what process I follow to write image alternative text, and it occurred to me that I don’t use a checklist or guideline anymore. That may or may not be a good thing,…
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.…
TL;DR: Keep your image alternative text brief, devoid of special characters, empty of URLs, and ideally in one language. Here We Go Sometimes you can have too much alternative text, particularly for an <img>. I don’t mean there is a limit to what is allowed, I mean there is a…
The world wide web has officially lasted 35 consecutive years, which means it’s catching up to its parent, the Internet, which itself is bearing down on 55. That’s an important distinction. The Internet is not the web; it is the foundation on which the web was born. Prior Years For…
Controls that can operate other controls in bulk are not new. One common example is a single checkbox that allows you to check or uncheck a group of checkboxes. Another example is a single button that lets you expand or collapse a set of disclosure widgets. When the user operates…
Photo by studio tdes. Used under CC BY 2.0 Deed. Image cropped and contrast enhanced. A few days ago Benjy Stanton asked about breaking long words in tables. I offered a suggestion, which may or may not have worked. I never asked. My failure to follow up aside, it reminded…
How the <abbr> element is defined and exposed, along with the title attribute: § 4.5.9 The abbr element from WHATWG. ARIA in HTML entry on <abbr> notes it has no implicit role and naming is prohibited. Which is probably why Core Accessibility API Mappings 1.2 does not list it. HTML…
There are plenty of use cases for embedding third-party content on a site, as well as local content that may not be in HTML. Perhaps you gave a talk and want to share your slides. Sometimes you want to reference a video that exists only on YouTube. Maybe you have…
This post supplements Browser Video Players Review. There I wade into the de facto accessibility of the <video> element based on the default video players provided by browsers. The results of my testing here update the tables in that post. One of the primary challenges of using the browsers’ default…
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…
Before you get too far into this post, maybe read Browser Video Players Review. There I wade into the accessibility of the <video> element based on the video players browsers provide. Then maybe read Scott Jehl’s How to Use Responsive HTML Video (…and Audio!). I am leaning on support in…