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…
9 May 2023: The 2.5.8 language has changed. For the latest bookmarklet and language, skip ahead to the 9 May update. The proposed WCAG version 2.2 has gone through a bunch of revisions since I covered the first draft in 2020. One new success criterion that persisted is 2.5.8 Target…
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…
Automated accessibility testing tools are rightly wary of giving false positives. You don’t want to flag something as an error in a test only to have the team rebuild an entire thing for no reason (never mind the risk of introducing errors). We know automated accessibility testing tools can really…
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…
Many of my clients try to reduce the number of controls on a screen by replacing them with single controls that change their name based on their purpose (what they unironically call reducing complexity). For example, presenting a download button that also acts as its own progress indicator and completion…
Let’s establish something first — auto-generated captions are a problem. They almost guarantee a WCAG failure and can leave users more confused (or offended) than when they started. YouTube creates the transcript from the closed captions of a video (the text that overlays the video, as opposed to burned-in or…
I have written a bunch about responsive tables. Maybe too much. I keep trying to give developers the information they need to make informed decisions — ARIA attributes, screen reader & browser pairing results, bugs, and so on. I have spread things out over years of posts. I have filed…
The title kind of says it all. WCAG 2.1 has been the standard for over two years — it was published in June 2018. If you rewind to when the Accessibility Guidelines Working Group (AGWG) was asking for feedback on its near-final 2.1 draft, many of the Success Criteria in…
WCAG 2.2 is live. Read the W3C’s What’s New in WCAG 2.2 to know what from this wildly outdated post made it into the final spec. The latest (and probably last) WCAG version 2 point release is in draft and the W3C is asking for comments and feedback by 18…
TL;DR: Regardless of what accessibility conformance level you target, do not arbitrarily open links in a new window or tab. If you are required to do so anyway, inform users in visible text. Overview Throughout this post I am going to use the terms browser window and tab interchangeably. While…
Since the early days of the web, when images could be floated and text would wrap around them, designers have wanted to bring drop caps onto the web. Then we learned how terrible a pattern like <img alt=”M” align=”left”>atthew is for users, and CSS introduced :first-letter, letting us believe all…