Testing with assistive technologies is an important part of any accessibility review. However, especially when auditing against the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), they should not be the primary tools to use for testing. Here’s why: Support Eric’s independent work …

Craig Abbott wrote about the term “best practice” today. Thanks to posting his thoughts on Mastodon, I had time to kick my brain into gear and think about the topic myself. The first thing I noticed when reading his piece is that how he experienced the term is different from how …

I frequently see the word “help” used in accessibility, and I don’t like it. This is certainly a personal gripe, but I want to share my thinking behind avoiding it. First, where there is “help”, there is “helplessness”. Using the word “help” in the accessibility context implies …

Auf der Seite barrieren-gutachten.de hat die wundervolle Casey Kreer Gutachten zum Stand der Barrierefreiheit in Deutschland erstmals übersichtlich aufgelistet. Die Übersicht enthält 188 Gutachten, von denen 187 zur Bewertung „nicht bestanden“ kommen. Nur ein Gutachten hat das …

In our tech-focused society, there is this ever present notion that “accessibility will be solved by some technology”. But it won’t. Making things accessible is a fundamentally human challenge that needs human solutions in human contexts. I wrote about automated testing before. …

I place the start of my career in accessibility to some time in 2008. Sure, I had done accessibility stuff before then, but I always saw me as a front-end developer with an interest in accessibility, not an outright person whose main focus was accessibility. I chose this …

This is a repost of a Twitter thread from August 2022. Slightly edited in format and for clarity. Accessibility must work within the constraints of an ableist world to improve things. I hope it can help to make the world a tiny bit less unjust every day. I have seen …

Every few months, the discussion comes up that you cannot make accessibility work if you are not fighting for disability rights or practicing inclusive design. While there is a kernel of truth in that – it will certainly be easier to make consistently good choices regarding the …

The latest WebAIM Million has come out. For those who are unaware, it is an automated accessibility evaluation of the top 1 Million home pages. While it is an automated test which only finds a subset of accessibility barriers, its results can at least show us trends: Average …

Over the past few years, accessibility companies have started to develop tools that claim to find accessibility problems automatically. Often the idea is that “automated testing is not quite there yet, but in a few years there will be a revolution”. I don't believe that. Human …

It’s January 2023 and there is a new WCAG 2.2 Candidate Recommendation Draft (which apparently is a different type of document from the September Candidate Recommendation Snapshot). Here is a diff between these two versions for your convenience. Table of Contents About the …

When you search for alternative text length on the internet, there seems to be a pretty common understanding that “some screen readers” truncate alternative text[^ Note that many people use the phrase “alt text”, because the “traditional” way to use alternative text is through …

People who are tasked with remediating accessibility often have little experience of how people with disabilities actually use the web. This leads to overcomplicated solutions, as they underestimate the capabilities of disabled people. A few years ago, I talked to a person new …

CSS generated content can have unintended side-consequences. As Andy Clarke discovered recently,  data- attributes he used as a way to transfer content into CSS for visual purposes are not translated using built-in browser functionality. His[^ Note that this is using Andy’s use …

In the past two days, people noticed that VoiceOver (VO) on top of Safari is not reading list semantics when the list is not styled in a list-like fashion. First things first: What does it mean for me as a web developer that Safari is not reading lists when it doesn't look like …

I’m happy to announce here that I will be speaking at Accessing Higher Ground in November, representing Knowbility. The conference is in Westminster, Colorado and coins itself as an “Accessible Media, Web and Technology Conference”. I will do two three-hour long workshops: …