What adding people with disabilities to your team brings to the mix
One of the biggest barriers to accessibility is awareness. We often hear how diversifying our workforce is good for business. I would like to examine why disabilities should be a part of that formula....
View ArticleWeb Components and the Accessibility Object model (AOM)
HTML is often underestimated – it isn’t complicated and it isn’t strict, and you can start producing results with just a handful of elements. It isn’t creative like CSS, or energetic like JavaScript,...
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Taking Accessibility Beyond Compliance
I reference the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 Success Criteria in my daily work. Recently, I looked back at how I have applied my interpretation to several success criteria and how I...
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8 Weird Tips Accessibility Specialists Don’t Want You to Know!
Number 4 Will Give You a Seizure The title is written as a so-called clickbait title and meant as a tongue-in-cheek joke. Often clickbait titles deceptively present tips as a form of powerful secret...
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The intersection of markup, content and context in accessibility
You’ve heard of this inclusive design thing, and know that a11y is a numeronym for accessibility. It matters to you, and you try to make the people and projects around you better for it. But you’ve...
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A Picture Says a Thousand Words, But Not Really
Zoey loves browsing the Internet. They enjoy getting lost in the interconnected web full of information, unraveling pieces of knowledge that are bookmark worthy. But they don’t enjoy skimming through...
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POUR the Foundation First
“The issue in Web accessibility is the fact that blind and visually-impaired people need the single biggest boost to achieve equivalence since the real-world Web is a visual medium.” — Joe Clark...
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Accessibility Testing by People with Disabilities
I believe that people with disabilities often end up as unwilling accessibility testers. Any time a person with a disability interacts with the web, they may be unwittingly performing testing because...
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An adventurer’s guide to W3C specs
2019 has been a landmark year for web standards milestones: the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) turned 25 this October, and it published the first version of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines...
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Building an accessible bingo web app
It started the way a lot of side projects these days seem to, with a “What if…” sent absent-mindedly over Slack. My teammates and I were about to attend a large meeting and were guessing at which...
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Game accessibility and the Web
Computer games are a big deal: they are part of our culture, they provide and can promote social inclusion, they can educate (from encouraging and supporting player creativity through making...
View ArticleMaking the web for real people
Hello, my name is Ian and I’m a grumpy, old (yet at the same time not quite middle-aged) web developer and accessibility specialist. I have a confession to make: sometimes I don’t enjoy using the web....
View ArticleThe future is now, so what about tomorrow?
It is possible to build accessible websites. We know because we have experimented with it and researched it. We have failed at it, and kept trying until we succeeded. We have tools, too. We have lists,...
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The Customer is Always Right
In the mid-’90s, I saw an TV ad for hearing aids. The most ironic part was this concluding screen: If you are the target audience of this ad, then you have difficulty hearing. Lest I remind you, using...
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Automating Inclusive Documentation
Do you practice Inclusive Design? Do you check the accessibility of your digital products? How accessible is your project documentation? Not sure where to start? Don’t worry, I’ll give you some ideas...
View ArticleA Blind System Administrator’s Journey to Microsoft
For the past three years, I have been working in the Cloud +AI division of Microsoft as a subject matter expert, advising teams on how best to fix accessibility bugs and promoting accessible design. I...
View ArticleWhy is an Agency the Perfect Place to Observe and Improve Digital Accessibility?
I work for Code and Theory (C&T), a digital-first creative agency headquartered in New York. C&T is an exceptionally iterative company—creating products and experiences at a rapid pace for...
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your poison
If the web accessibility community were to somehow collectively agree on a single rallying cry, it could easily be “use native, semantic HTML elements.” This, like most things in accessibility, is an...
View Articleyour poison part 2: test all the things
TL:DR; Jump straight to the recommendations In part 1 of this deep dive, we took a broad look at both how the native <select> element works across browsers and platforms, and the current state of...
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World-building accessibility literacy
Accessibility education in organizations is hard, but we can take some of the pressure off by focusing on teaching literacy instead of expertise (and making it a game). Photo by Sarah Pflug from Burst...
View ArticleAccessible Products: Beyond Code
In the field of creating accessible products and experiences, I have found that we are behind when it comes to one group in particular: individuals with Cognitive Disabilities. As a Digital...
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Color Theory and Contrast Ratios
There are no definites with color. Sure, you have your red, your green, and so on — but even that is relative. Try to describe a specific red color to a friend. Chances are the description will settle...
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Pixels vs. Relative Units in CSS: why it’s still a big deal
Long live the modern browser! Browsers are getting better these days. We seem to be in a golden age where there’s a never-ending stream of new features added for the benefit of the users accessing the...
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POURing ARIA into the HTML element specs
If you’re a web developer, or if you develop browsers or assistive technologies (AT), the following screenshot is probably familiar to you. It’s the first part of the definition of the button element...
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What a Year of Learning and Teaching Accessibility Taught Me
A few years ago I didn’t know what the term “accessibility” meant. I built Web sites that were partially inaccessible because I didn’t know better. Fast forward to today, I know enough to be able to...
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