On my site and on Twitter, I try to exude positivity and pragmatism. I try to tone down my admittedly strong personality as a way to ensure that what I write is well received. Sometimes I succeed. For the most part I tend to frown upon random bitch sessions about how bad everything is on …
One of the more frustrating things about accessibility is how ridiculously easy most things are to do. While most developers tend to see accessibility as nebulous and time consuming, the truth is some of the most impactful issues are actually easy to deal with. As a case-in-point: consider simple keyboard accessibility for custom controls otherwise …
I’ve historically been very critical of the various Business Case arguments for accessibility given their lack of actual evidence. There’s one business case argument that I think is rock solid: The cost of remediation. The cost of remediation actually has two faces: The actual time-on-task it takes to fix issues, of course, but also the …
Yes, that was a purposefully click-bait headline. One of the most frustrating things for users is unclear or unintuitive form constraints. My personal pet peeve are phone number, credit card, or SSN/ EIN fields which ask for numeric-only entry. While it may very well be necessary that your field use only numeric data, you don’t …
Several weeks ago, Bryan Garaventa made a post to the WAI-IG mailing list. The email thread went somewhat sideways, because some list members didn’t “get it” but it died down quickly enough. AccessIQ reignited the issue, wondering “…do web accessibility professionals have a sense of humour?” My response? Clearly the answer is NO. Even when …
The Paciello Group has recently uploaded all of the sessions from the Inclusive Design 24 event that was held on Global Accessibility Awareness Day. My session was titled “Prioritizing Remediation of Accessibility Issues” as described: Once you have a report from an accessibility consultant, automated tool, or your QA team, now what? Not all issues …
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 …