As I established in my prior post, "Understanding the cost of not being accessible", repairing accessibility issues is costly. There are two ways that repairing accessibility issues can get expensive.…
Web Accessibility Viking
Category: Development
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 …
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 …
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 …
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.
- Foo
- |
- Bar
- |
- Bat
- |
- Baz
The above code structure, obviously scrubbed …
CSS is designed primarily to enable the separation of document content (written in HTML or a similar markup language) from document presentation. Prior to CSS, nearly all of the presentational attributes of HTML documents were contained within the HTML markup; all font colors, background styles, element alignments, borders and sizes had to be explicitly described, …
Quick: what is this? If the word “Button” comes to mind, you might be right. Unfortunately we’ve been seeing a lot of instances in our testing where an image or CSS styling is used to trigger an action of some kind. Here are some markup samples: 
Continue readingLinks are not buttons. Neither are DIVs and SPANs
4.1.2 Name, Role, Value: For all user interface components (including but not limited to: form elements, links and components generated by scripts), the name and role can be programmatically determined; states, properties, and values that can be set by the user can be programmatically set; and notification of changes to these items is available to …
In my career, I’ve been lucky enough to work for companies that did cool stuff. This goes for both my employer and my clients. Nothing is so energizing as to work with really smart people who create really cool products. One that will always stick with me is the Nextel FanView. The FanView started as …