Hey, Alphabet or Google or Chrome or whomever in that illegal monopoly continues to release things to the web platform that are full of accessibility barriers, I have what I think is a straightforward request. My Request Please, if your team cannot explain how the thing satisfies all WCAG Success…
…Unless you want to fail all the WCAGs, create litigation risk, close off opportunities in Europe, engage in reputational harm, and oh yeah, throw up barriers to your customers and users. What am I talking about? Figma announced Figma Sites, letting you publish your Figma designs directly to the web.…
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…
This post is part of RSS Club, rewarding those who still use RSS to read and/or share content. These posts are embargoed from my regular post feed and the socials for an arbitrary period of time. You can see all the RSS-only posts at AdrianRoselli.com/category/RSS. Tell your friends (to get…
LLM-powered chatbots are here to stay. As a result, I am playing around with a disclaimer to recommend for clients. After all, if the LLM says that it’s fine to mix chlorine and ammonia to clean the sink, then that chatbot user needs to be told to probably confirm it…
It’s weird to me that after I urged everyone not to disable form controls, a bunch of them decided that making them read-only was somehow better. But here we are. What’s in the box? Photo by Michael Heiss, no edits, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0. HTML The readonly attribute is only allowed…
Alex Russell wrote a four-part series a couple weeks ago arguing that modern JavaScript-first framework-focused front-end development is costing the industry and users. Part of his conclusion for organizations: Never, ever hire for JavaScript framework skills. Instead, interview and hire only for fundamentals like web standards, accessibility, modern CSS, semantic…
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…
It is not uncommon for someone to message, call, email, or carrier pigeon me to ask if something is accessible. They almost invariably want a “yes” or “no.” However, I need to understand what the heck they mean and what the other-heck prompted them to ask. Yes, I would be…
One easy thing you can do for the earth is not use “AI” tools. Consider this as a programmer, web developer, web designer, copywriter, webmaster, etc. The tools include anything branded as generative AI, LLMs, computer vision tools, Copilot, ChatGPT, Bard, Grok, Dall-e, Midjourney, and so on. If you are…
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…
Yes, that is the bear from Jakob’s clearly spurious alternative text example and yes, that is The Fonz after jumping the shark. If you have been following the saga of Jakob Nielsen, there a few quotes I could use here: Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster (Nietzsche).…