Dear sighted reader, I want you to read this post without looking at the images. Each has been hidden in a disclosure. Instead, read the alternative text I provide and visualize how it may look. Then read the automatically generated alternative text, and try to visualize it then. Consider how…
Native controls can be different from their roled-up ARIA equivalents in a variety of ways. For example, an expanded native HTML <select> on mobile behaves differently when the dismiss gesture is used than when the same gesture is used with an expanded ARIA listbox. Using Android with TalkBack, a down-then-left…
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…
Others in this sorta-series: Under-Engineered Custom Radio Buttons and Checkboxen Under-Engineered Toggles Under-Engineered Toggles Too Under-Engineered Text Boxen Under-Engineered Responsive Tables Under-Engineered Select Menus Under-Engineered Dependency Questions This post is not about <select multiple> nor a bunch of <div>s roled-up into a listbox with aria-multiselectable. Both the APG examples and…
On 7 April 2022, Twitter added a feature to let all web users display the alternative text on images in tweets. I am glad to see this feature in the wild for everyone. It has some issues, however, which complicate the experience for sighted keyboard users. The following video demonstrates…
Honoring April Fools’ Day I have created a foolishly responsive accordion control. Typically a responsive effort shoehorns a large pattern into a narrow viewport, often based on iDevice screen sizes. Less typically a responsive layout will also consider viewport height, and far less typically a responsive layout might even consider…
This block of code came across my Twitter timeline today framed as a CSS tip to prevent text selection on a web page: html { user-select: none; } For funsies, I dropped that CSS on this very page you are reading (assuming you are reading it in the browser). It…
The required set of radio buttons. The white whale to many a developer who is trying their darnedest to ensure they are conveyed accessibly while not also making it sound like every individual radio button must be toggled. 1961 Cadillac Wonderbar dashboard radio by Nicholas Lucien (cropped). CC BY 2.0.…
Others in this sorta-series: Under-Engineered Custom Radio Buttons and Checkboxen Under-Engineered Toggles Under-Engineered Toggles Too Under-Engineered Text Boxen Under-Engineered Select Menus A common interface pattern allows users to choose one item from a pre-defined set of choices, while still allowing them to add a custom selection if nothing else fits.…
The title of this post is pretty specific. It relates to the meme on Twitter where users identify a trait or preference that they see as problematic, and identify it as a red flag. The emoji represents the red flag. For example: A stylized red flag Blaming Screen Readers 🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩…
Whether you call them sentence forms, narrative forms, fill-in-the-blank forms, or Mad Libs forms, you are probably describing a form where the fields are interspersed within words in a sentence. Unlike more traditional forms, laid out with simple pairings of labels and fields, these forms are meant to be read…
Though JS-free fixed table row and column headers have been possible for quite some time, Safari’s and Chrome’s recent fixes got some people pretty excited. Enough that folks are copying code samples in whole, without always paying attention to necessary considerations. That same excited demo included other CSS properties that…