This morning I’m sitting here in bed as I do virtually every morning: Working on one of many programming projects. Sometimes they’re “official” projects and sometimes just experiments. The big difference today is that I’m in San Jose, CA for Open Web Camp. About 45 minutes ago I spoke briefly with my wife. As I …
Today I came across a post by Simon Harper titled Web Accessibility Evaluation Tools Only Produce a 60-70% Correctness which is essentially a response to my earlier critique of a seriously flawed academic paper. I submitted a response on Simon’s site, but I want to copy it here for my regular readers. One thing that …
I’ve had an epiphany. Accessibility Consulting, that process where a client hires us to go through their system, test it for accessibility issues, and submit a report to them, is fundamentally broken. My personal interpretation of our goal, as professionals, is to make money doing Good. Our advanced level of knowledge, skills, and experience can …
For several years I’ve been interested in finding and reading academic work in the field of web accessibility. I have a very strong belief that the things we say regarding web accessibility must be based on a significant amount of rigor and I hold in higher esteem those who base their statements on fact rather than …
Recently, I saw someone Tweet that “…ARIA should be last” when working to make a website accessible. As you learn in Logic 101, generalized statements are particularly false. Such a broad statement, though mostly correct at least in spirit, is wholly incorrect in certain situations. ARIA is clearly the right choice in cases where native …
The original issue A link is used to perform the action of a button. The code below is used to show a region of the page which is hidden by default. Screen readers will read this code as a link and expect that it will navigate. Instead, upon activating this link, focus remains on the …
…how many bigger issues have we missed wasting our time fixing this kind of crap? @thebillygregory Literally every single audit report I’ve ever done includes issues relating to the following: Missing alt attributes for images Missing explicit relationships between form fields and their labels Tables without headers or without explicit relationships between header cells and …
In the previous post in this series, I ended with a discussion that “current automatic accessibility testing practices take place at the wrong place and wrong time and is done by the wrong people” but really this applies to all accessibility testing. Of course every organization is different, but my experience substantiates the statement quite …
The recent release of WebAIM’s 5th Screen Reader User Survey has heated up a recently simmering debate regarding whether or not it should be possible to detect screen readers. Currently there are no reliable means of determining whether a user with disabilities is visiting your site and, specific to screen readers, this is because that …
In Everything you know about accessibility testing is wrong (part 1) I left off talking about automated accessibility testing tools. It is my feeling that a tool of any kind absolutely must deliver on its promise to make the user more effective at the task they need the tool to perform. As a woodworker, I …