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 …
My first experience with accessibility and, therefore, accessibility testing, came from Bobby. In 1995, CAST launched Bobby as a free public service to make the burgeoning World Wide Web more accessible to individuals with disabilities. Over the next decade, Bobby helped novice and professional Web designers analyze and make improvements to millions of Web pages. …
I’ve been running into these pretty frequently lately so I figured I’d throw something together about it: text characters as visual separators. As much as I’d like to say modern development practices have grown beyond such things, it apparently hasn’t.
The above code structure, obviously scrubbed …
From the US Department of Justice’s ADA office: The Justice Department announced today that it seeks to intervene in a lawsuit against HRB Digital, LLC and HRB Tax Group, Inc. (“Block”) in federal court in Boston to remedy violations of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). The department’s proposed complaint in intervention in the lawsuit, …
As a web developer, one of the biggest sources of frustration is developing a website that works across the wide array of user agents and operating systems the visitor may be using. The web standards movement was supposed to “fix” that. It did make good progress and then CSS3, HTML5, and HTML5 multimedia and mobile …