I had the pleasure of giving a workshop at Booster Conference 2016 on accessibility. As it was the last slot of the last day, it ended up being more of an interactive talk than a hands-on session, but the audience seemed to appreciate that. Or view it directly on SlideShare:…
Users have repeatedly asked for a method to provide alternative text for images on Twitter. Since so many of Twitter’s features today are just codified versions of what the community invented on its own, many of us hoped Twitter would just build some proper support. Instead, Twitter pushes for more…
Imagine that as a user you regularly use the keyboard for non-data-entry tasks. Think about how frustrating it is to have to grab the mouse to hover over something on the screen just to see it. Now imagine that you are a keyboard-only user. That problem can be addressed somewhat…
During a recent consultation on a mobile project, I broached the topic of gestures that are used by assistive technology on various devices. I gathered links to resources for my client and figured I’d share them here as well. Apple has gathered together the gestures used by VoiceOver on iOS…
This May I’ll be running an afternoon workshop for Create Upstate. Create Upstate rallies makers from Buffalo to Albany and everywhere in between in a celebration of design and community, and I’ll get a chance to promote accessibility to some of those makers. I’ll be taking my Selfish Accessibility talk…
I’m pretty excited to be returning to Booster Conference in Bergen, Norway this spring. Last year I presented a lightning talk on print styles. This year I opted to aim a little higher and submitted a workshop on accessibility. The abstract from my talk: If you’re familiar with accessibility, you…
Screen shot of the Zurb Foundation advice for accessible buttons, where it shows anchors and a div each with role=”button”. In short, a perfect example of everything you could do wrong. NOTE: This was version 5.5.3. Most of this is fixed in the current version as of this writing (6.1.2).…
This is, to some extent, a response to the article at Usability Geek titled Making A Case For The Desktop Hamburger Menu (which I had the Wayback Machine capture because I have learned my lesson). I left a comment on the article, but it motivated me to write something on…
I received a design for a project recently that called for a search field hidden behind a single icon — no visible label text, no visible field, no submit button. While I’ve seen this pattern on sites repeatedly, I feel they generally get it wrong. Relying on bloated HTML and…
Animated image of the Gitter sidecar with the a11y Slackers channel embedded on my site. If you are unfamiliar with the a11y Slackers channel on Gitter, I encourage you to read Steve Faulkner’s post, Anybody can be an A11y Slacker. Essentially it’s an alternative to the accessibility channel on Slack.…
Last week Smashing Magazine published a lengthy and detailed post titled The State Of Airline Websites 2015: Lessons Learned. While it was an impressive dive into the user experience of each site covered, it left out any aspect of accessibility. Surprising perhaps no one, I got as far as reading…
Not intentionally, of course. Images captured using the Chromatic Vision Simulator app on my phone. The last two images show three different kinds of colorblindness each: protanopia, deuteranopia, and tritanopia. The NFL provided a great and highly visible (pun!) case study in how colorblindness affects people and, given football’s wide…