Try text scaling support in Chrome Canary - Josh Tumath
There’s a new meta tag on the block. This time it’s for allowing system-level text sizing to apply to your website.
Link tags: a11y
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Accessibility For Everyone by Laura Kalbag
Laura’s classic book is now a web book that you can read for free online.
“AI is inevitable” is bullshit · Eric Eggert
LLMs are useful when you need a compromise between fast and good. You will never get a good outcome fast.
I’m afraid we are settling into a status of good enough when using “AI,” which is especially hurtful for accessibility.
Developing an alt text button for images on my website | James’ Coffee Blog
I like the idea of adding this to personal websites:
Mastodon shows an “Alt” button in the bottom right of images that have associated alt text. This button, when clicked, shows the alt text the author has written for the image.
Introducing: Webbed Sites (Webbed Briefs)
I heard you like divs…
80 / 20 accessibility · marcus.io
So my observation is that 80% of the subject of accessibility consists of fairly simple basics that can probably be learnt in 20% of the time available. The remaining 20% are the difficult situations, edge cases, assistive technology support gaps and corners of specialised knowledge, but these are extrapolated to 100% of the subject, giving it a bad, anxiety-inducing and difficult reputation overall.
The Web Accessibility Cookbook
Manu’s book is available to pre-order now. I’ve had a sneak peek and I highly recommend it!
You’ll learn how to build common patterns written accessibly in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. You’ll also start to understand how good and bad practices affect people, especially those with disabilities.
Home - Sa11y
Another handy accessibility testing tool that can be used as a bookmarklet.
Write Alt Text Like You’re Talking To A Friend – Cloud Four
This is good advice:
Write alternative text as if you’re describing the image to a friend.
On Nielsen’s ideas about generative UI for resolving accessibility
Per Axbom quite rightly tears Jakob Nielsen a new one.
I particularly like his suggestion that you re-read Nielsen’s argument but replace the word “accessibility” with “usability”:
Assessed this way, the
accessibilityusabiity movement has been a miserable failure.
AccessibilityUsability is too expensive for most companies to be able to afford everything that’s needed with the current, clumsy implementation.
jgarber623/aria-collapsible: A dependency-free Web Component that generates progressively-enhanced collapsible regions using ARIA States and Properties.
This is a really lovely little HTML web component from Jason. It does just one thing—wires up a trigger button to toggle-able content, taking care of all the ARIA for you behind the scenes.
The Folly of Chasing Demographics - YouTube
I just attended this talk from Heydon at axe-con and it was great! Of course it was highly amusing, but he also makes a profound and fundamental point about how we should be going about working on the web.
I worry our Copilot is leaving some passengers behind - Josh Collinsworth blog
Products of all kinds are required to ensure misuse is discouraged, at a minimum, if not difficult or impossible. I don’t see why LLMs should be any different.
Utopia WCAG warnings | Trys Mudford
Wouldn’t it be great if all web tools gave warnings like this?
As you generate and tweak your type scale, Utopia will now warn you if any steps fail WCAG SC 1.4.4, and tell you between which viewports the problem lies.
To hell with the business case
I agree with everything that Matt says here. Evangelising accessibility by extolling the business benefits might be a good strategy for dealing with psychopaths, but it’s a lousy way to convince most humans.
The moment you frame the case for any kind of inclusion or equity around the money an organization stands to gain (or save), you have already lost. What you have done is turn a moral case, one where you have the high ground, into an economic one, where, unless you have an MBA in your pocket, you are hopelessly out of your depth.
If you win a business-case argument, the users you wanted to benefit are no longer your north star. It’s money.
Let’s reinvent the wheel ⚒ Nerd
Vasilis gives the gist of his excellent talk at the border:none event that just wrapped up in Nuremberg. The rant at the end chimed very much with my feelings on this topic:
I showed a little interaction experiment that one of my students made, with incredible attention to detail. Absolutely brilliant in so many ways. You would expect that all design agencies would be fighting to get someone like that into their design team. But to my amazement she now works as a react native developer.
I have more of these very talented, very creative designers who know how to code, who really understand how the web works, who can actually design things for the web, with the web as a medium, who understand the invisible details, who know about the UX of HTML, who know what’s possible with modern HTML and CSS. Yet when they start working they have to choose: you either join our design team and are forced to use a tool that doesn’t get it, or you join the development team and are forced to use a ridiculous framework and make crap.
Practical Accessibility — Practical Accessibility for web designers and developers
This online course from Sara looks superb!
I know how overwhelming and even frustrating accessibility may feel at first. But I promise you, accessibility isn’t always as hard as it seems (especially if you know where and when to start!). And my goal with this course is to make it friendlier and more approachable.
Best of all, there’s $100 off if you sign up now—that’s a 25% saving.
ARIA, the good parts
The slides from Hidde’s presentation at Paris Web—a great overview of using and misusing ARIA.
Randoma11y - Accessible color combinations
Unusual colour combinations that are also accessible—keep smashing that “New colors” button.