Bookmarked Web Accessibility Is Out To Get You And Make You Feel Sad by Heydon Pickering (heydonworks.com)

Since the landmark Domino’s case, I’ve been having some conversations about web accessibility with people who wouldn’t ordinarily take an interest. Some of these conversations have been productive; others have not. The following is a dramatization based on true events.

This is a good read to keep on hand for those days when you’ve lost your patience with the pushback regarding web accessibility and will probably be necessary until things like punching people and daydrinking become acceptable options for coping.

I’m still laughing. This is the funniest thing I’ve read when it comes to web accessibility in a very long time.

Read Coming in WordPress 5.3: What is the PHP Spread Operator? by Justin Tadlock

On October 9, Juliette Reinders Folmer announced on the core WordPress blog that WordPress 5.3 will use the spread operator. The spread operator was one of the new features made available in PHP 5.6, a version released in 2014.
WordPress abandoned PHP 5.2 – 5.5 with the release of WordPress 5.2. This means the core team can start taking advantage of relatively new features, or at least 5-year-old features. For plugin and theme developers who maintain the same minimum version support as WordPress, they can also start exploring this feature.

Wow. Basecamp’s gotten a metric ton of accessibility improvements.

Finally, reasonably accessible project management.

I have a lot of catching up to do to get in line with the way everyone else manages their projects, but I suspect my life’s about to get a lot easier.

Mmmm fewer spreadsheets and fewer hacky internal applications.

Bookmarked Accessibility Inspector by Mozilla (MDN Web Docs)

The Accessibility Inspector provides a means to access important information exposed to assistive technologies on the current page via the accessibility tree, allowing you to check what’s missing or otherwise needs attention. This article takes you through the main features of the Accessibility Inspector and how to use it.

Watched
I used Noter Live to generate these takeawayss, post them to Twitter as a thread, and generate the HTML with Microformats 2 to then post on my website. It’s really easy to use, very accessible, and is great for helping to ownw the content I create.

As with all Inclusive Design 24 talks, this one will include captions soon after the conference is over.

Marco Zehe:

Marco has worked for Mozilla since 2007, always in the accessibility field. He does quality assurance. He also worked for Freedom Scientific and helped with braille display dev in the early 2000’s.

Accessibility inspector is a new addition to Firefox dev toools, it’s a year old now.

Mozilla wanted to make sure devs could make their sites more accessible without having to download extras.

accessibility inspector allows devs to inspect the accessibility tree as presented to assistive technology users.

Latere versions introduce auditing features to highlight easily solvable problems. Helps devs solve problems and lets them see the problems go away.

Accessibility inspector is inside dev tools beside the HTML inspector. can be turned on in the context menu as well.

Unless you’re a screen reader user, turn on accessibility engine first.

Turn off when not using because it slows down the browser thanks to extra processing. If you turn off for one tab it turns it off for all.

Screen readers can’t accidentally turn off the accessibility engine.

Marco is demoing the tree views of the inspector.

Inspector is fully keyboard accessible.

If you have more than one tool bar on a page make sure that they are labeled and state their purposes. Marco is citing chapter and verse of WCAG.

Another cool visual feature: Accessibility highlight. Use the mouse to highlight and info bar shows complete color contrast for all colors and shows which ones pass.

Mozilla is trying to advance auditing with machine learning. Trying to determine whether or not machine learning can help. Finds patterns for fake elements.

Helps with div soup.

Mozilla wants feedback. Bugzilla, Twitter, public chat facilities.

The inspector can output its results as a json file.

Import resultant json into your tool of choice.

You can use the inspector as a blind/VI person. Sweet! Gonna go play with this now.

The info from the inspector is available on Linux as well, so you’ll get good enough results to not have to worry about switching to Mack/Windows screen readeres.

Marco attempts to avoid Chrome V. Firefox accessibility toools death match. Playing this well.

You can make dynamic changes in the dom inspector and they will be reflected in the accessibility inspector. Seems like this could be great for temporary hacks by screen readers.

Oh hey it’s @aardrian!

Mozilla’s accessibility team heavily collaborates with the other teams. Collaboration is facilitated. WordPress, please take note.

Thanks Marco, this talk was excellent, and I’m looking forward to playing with this.

Disabled friends of abled people don’t let said abled people un-ironically use the phrase “differently abled”. If you’re using that phrase, the odds are high that you haven’t spent any time around disabled people, especially visibly disabled people. I’m bringing this up because I’m scrolling through Twitter and just ran across someone using “differently abled” as part of their foundation name, and I kind of want to hurl.