Category: Accessibility

There are 158 posts filed in Accessibility (this is page 13 of 27).

Read HTML Source Order vs CSS Display Order by Adrian Roselli

Last month in my post Source Order Matters I wrote about why we need to consider how the source order of the HTML of a page can affect users when the CSS re-orders the content visually. While I used a recipe as an analogue and cited WCAG conformance rules, I failed to provide specific examples. I prepared one for my talk at Accessibility Camp Toronto, but have since expanded on it with more examples.
I want to make sure that we all understand that the source order versus display order discussion is not unique to CSS Flexbox. It is not unique to CSS Grids. Many developers have been dealing with this (correctly and incorrectly) since CSS floats and absolute positioning were introduced (and even earlier with tabled layouts). As such, I have examples of each in this post (no tabled layouts).

Worth a read and reread by anyone doing anything with CSS. For some reason, Adrian’s feed was not in my RSS reader. This is now fixed.
Read Defining PDF Accessibility by WebAIM: Web Accessibility In Mind

When people talk about “accessible” PDF files, they are usually referring to “tagged” PDF files. PDF tags provide a hidden, structured representation of the PDF content that is presented to screen readers. They exist for accessibility purposes only and have no visible effect on the PDF file. There is more to an accessible PDF file than tags, but an untagged PDF would not be considered “accessible”.

Dear accessibility practitioners, please don’t use @medium as your primary publishing platform. Syndicate there if you must, but Medium doesn’t support alt text for images, and has given no indication that it plans to. Its last comment on the subject of alt text was made several years ago and amounts to “Sorry not sorry”. So, avoid Medium as your primary publishing platform, and go with a website of your own that you can control instead. Then, syndicate to Medium.
Read The boring front-end developer by Adam Silver

Cool front-end developers are always pushing the envelope, jumping out of their seat to use the latest and greatest and shiniest of UI frameworks and libraries. However, there is another kind of front-end developer, the boring front-end developer. Here is an ode to the boring front-end developer, BFED if you will.

I’m not saying that a framework or design style is automatically rendered inaccessible simply by virtue of its becoming trendy. It’s worth pointing out though that, if there were less emphasis on using the hottest thing and more on all the very unsexy parts of front-end development, (semantic HTML, properly written CSS, designing with things like color contrast in mind), the web would be a lot less problematic from an inclusive design standpoint.
Demand letters are the single most ineffective tool for creating meaningful improvements with regard to web accessibility, and are the quickest way to torpido the cultural and policy changes which allow technical fixes to be anything more than temporary, surface-level progress. Demand letters serve only to turn accessibility advocates into ambulance chasers. This is a hill I will absolutely die on and anyone who disagrees with me is more than welcome to bring it on.
Everybody is swooning over Google’s upcoming automated captions, except zero of the people who actually need them. I have to wondere how it is that as an industry we manage to convince ourselves that we’ve collaborated with people with disabilities on all this amazing new accessibility tech that helps us avoid the obvious solution: Do it right in the first place. I’m sure there were messages across email lists, or surveys, or whatever, with asks for testers, ETC. But the deaf community has been saying for years that automated captions aren’t an optimal solution, and it seems arrogant to me at worst and well-meaningly naive at best that all that advice about automated captions would be ignored for the sake of Google’s business goals. We know what accessibility advancements look like, because people with disabilities have been telling us what they need, for years. Maybe one day as an industry we’ll actually start listening. I’m not holding my breath for the foreseeable future though.