When I wrote Under-Engineered Text Boxen in 2019 I mentioned <datalist> (WHATWG, MDN) but did not dwell on it. Partly because support was poor at the time. Once Can I Use’s <datalist> entry listed Firefox on Android supporting it in version 110, I got excited and started testing to write…
In recent years, a series of new technologies have provided better experiences and outcomes for disabled users. Collectively branded “Artificial Intelligence”, the two biggest breakthroughs have been in computer vision and large language models (LLM). The former, computer vision, allows a computer to describe an image based on extensive training…
This is not a comparison between popovers and dialogs, nor is it a discussion of support. This is me trying to get ahead of a potential issue for users when developers mix and match the patterns. I will let this 32 second video explain: Sorry, your browser doesn’t support embedded…
The slides for my talk are available as a
When many devs, testers, and authors first start listening to content through a screen reader, they are surprised to hear dates, pricing, names, abbreviations, acronyms, etc. announced differently than they expect. With the best of intentions (or branding panic) they may seek to force screen readers to announce content as…
This post is about exposing field errors programmatically. I have already shared some opinions (such as a caution about displaying messages below fields or avoiding default browser field validation), but this post dives into using ARIA to convey them to screen reader users. With fields that produce error messages on…
Usually. I originally titled this InacCSS-onlyible. I even made this typographically, er, distinct image. Then I realized it was silly and will instead use the neologism in a talk so I can hear the groans IRL. Interactive widgets powered with only CSS are relatively common as people are playing with…
Using ARIA instead of HTML is generally fine for content, layout, structure, and other static bits of a page. A <div role=”heading” aria-level=”1″> is the same as <h1> as far users and accessibility APIs are concerned. It is unlikely a user will ever notice the difference unless you use both…
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…
As the world’s leading expert on a people-first approach to computer vision, I am dedicated to providing insights that enable designers, developers, and copywriters to create accessible images at the highest possible velocity. A velocity so high, in fact, you can almost hear the point whistling over their head, like…
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, NVDA, and VoiceOver. This can be handy when testing issues reported by users and you do not have…
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…