I need your help. Legal documents are common on the web. Each site that has a Terms of Service written in impenetrable and indecipherable legalese, like this sentence, delights in that complexity to dissuade users from reading it and realizing just what they are giving up. “Am”, “add”, and “it”…
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…
Keyboard interaction note for just one control from the entire panoply of HTML controls: A native <button> fires on key down when that key is Enter. If you hold down the Enter key, it continues to fire for as long you hold Enter (or something crashes). A native <button> fires…
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…
Disclaimer: This post and the headline is my opinion. I provide verifiable facts throughout to inform that opinion. I am also not a lawyer and this post does not constitute legal advice. FACIL’iti is one of many vendors that claims its accessibility overlay product can make your site “accessible”. Like…
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.…
Google has an extensive history of releasing products and tools that fail basic accessibility. This is not a function of individuals — Google has some very talented and capable accessibility practitioners. Instead, this is an organizational failure. Failure to require accessibility in its products or services. Failure to support teams…
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.…