My favourite colour is Chuck Norris red - HTMHell
@vale@fedi.vale.rocks shows the resilience of the web
Accessibility
How to Dehumanize Accessibility with AI | Ashlee M Boyer
@ashleemboyer@mstdn.social on why it’s dehumanizing and unnecessary to ask “AI” about the disabled experience, when disabled people exist.
AI is not impacted by inaccessibility. It is not a disabled person. It cannot explain web accessibility from the perspective of a disabled person.
Removing the human factor of inaccessibility stories does not build empathy. It dehumanizes the stories. It dehumanizes US.
Additionally, inaccessibility is not a result of a lack of empathy. It’s a result of ableism. To still position lack of empathy as the main problem in almost 2025, is a failure to consider vital historical context.
Creating AI caricatures of disabled people does not help us dismantle systemic ableism.
I also take issue with the alleged need for comments to be “appealing” or “humorous.” Nothing appealing nor humorous about inaccessibility. Inaccessibility is PAINFUL in every single sense of the word. When disabled people encounter inaccessibility, we are harmed every. single. time.
WCAG 3 December 2024 Update - Thoughts from the Co-Chair
Great overview on the new draft, but I (@yatil@yatil.social) think it is interesting to see how close this seems to align with current WCAG 2 format and organization…
Beautiful focus outlines · Medienbäcker Thomas Günther
Some good focus considerations by @medienbaecker@mastodon.social
Unfortunately, focus outlines are often overlooked in web design. Clients and designers might not even notice them, leaving developers to handle design and implementation. Some might even suggest removing focus outlines for a cleaner aesthetic 😱
Don’t Use aria-label on Static Text Elements
This is why it is essential to check for correctimplementations according to the spec first and then verify using assistive technologies. If you follow the spec, you do not run into these cases where assistive technologies try to repair broken code to ensure access.
HTMHAIL - HTMHell
@tink@frontend.social about AI and the most basic of HTML questions.
(Spoiler in the reply.)
Suddenly I knew exactly how Arthur Dent felt, dealing with the Nutrimatic Drinks Dispenser in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Just like the cup of tea it dispensed to Arthur, the code provided by ChatGPT was, to paraphrase, almost, but not quite, entirely unlike the HTML for an accessible button.
Not so short note on aria-label usage – Big Table Edition – HTML Accessibility
‘I was in denial about it’: actor Matt McGorry on having long Covid
Orange Is the New Black and How to Get Away With Murder star speaks about the disease and another way of looking at health
Before going to the oncologist’s office, I’d asked if he could wear an N95, and the staff said he’s not really a masker. He walks in the room and he starts putting the mask on. And he says, “We’ll do this quickly before I suffocate.”
I think people don’t understand that. You’re asking, “Hey, would you mind protecting my life?” When someone’s like, “Oh God, what a pain in the ass,” experiences like that make you reticent to ask in the future.
Having felt how terrifying it is to feel like your health is free-falling in a world, a system, a country that does not value disabled people and does not value people without their labor has been clarifying to me on how I want to be able to show up for someone else.
If we’re only focused on individual change and not on the systemic issues that actually have a larger impact on health, like poverty and lack of access to medical care, then what we’re doing is not really about health. It’s about thinness and desirability and social status.
The risk mitigation in my life is very high. When your health is taken away from you, you realize how important it is. There’s not much that feels worth the risk of another Covid infection.
Even as an act of solidarity, picking a couple of those places, making a commitment to that and making that known is incredibly important. As someone who feels extremely isolated and abandoned by the rest of society, I don’t have the capacity any more to ask individual people in my life if they will take this on. That’s what the video was for.
If I push up to the point where I get brain fatigue, I start to feel like shit, basically. The fatigue becomes exponential very quickly. It wasn’t until later that I realized that when I reach the limit, that is because I’ve gotten beyond it, and that has a cost.
I’m new to experiencing it first-hand, but a lot of the systemic oppression that disabled people face is neglect. It may not be outright vitriol. If you don’t take the action to make the space accessible, we can’t be there, or we can’t be there safely. We have to risk our lives. If you cut the funding for programs that people need to survive, you just get people who kind of fall by the wayside
I tell everyone that I have long Covid, because I want everyone to know that it exists. The guy who’s taking 27 vials of my blood in a lab, he’s like, “Damn, that’s a lot of vials.” And I’m like, “Yeah, it’s for long Covid.”
[With a wider audience,] it’s really more about the fear of people making assumptions about my abilities, and therefore my ability to work.
One of the most common ways disabled people are discriminated against is people making assumptions about their capacities and not consulting them about it.
The actor, known for roles in Orange Is the New Black and How to Get Away With Murder, revealed he had “never fully recovered” after two Covid infections. “Long Covid has dramatically changed my life,” said McGorry, describing symptoms including debilitating fatigue, depression, dysautonomia, Raynaud’s disease and brain fog, which he called “a cute little name for brain damage”.
Assume the Position—A Labeling Story - TPGi
@lloydi@mastodon.social about label positions.
Avoid Read-only Controls
It’s weird to me that after I urged everyone not to disable form controls, a bunch of them decided that making them read-only was somehow better. But here we are. What’s in the box? Photo by Michael Heiss, no edits, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0. HTML The readonly attribute is only allowed…
Foundations: types of disability
By @TetraLogical@a11y.social
We are all, in essence, temporarily abled. As an ageing society, the reality is that our abilities are not fixed - they change over time. Disability is a complex and deeply personal experience that can impact anyone, whether through permanent, temporary, or situational conditions, or even a mix of these.
When something is inaccessible, it can be inaccessible to people with a permanent disability, such as blindness, but also those with temporary disabilities, like a migraine, or situational challenges, such as struggling to read a screen due to sun glare.
Your EU ecommerce site legally requires a dark mode by the 28th June 2025 - Robin Whittleton
Two different kinds of “focusable” UI elements · Eric Eggert
It’s me, @yatil@yatil.social, writing about two kinds of “focusable” UI elements. It’s really in the title, y’all.
Mind The (Remediation) Gap - TPGi
When auditors provide advice on accessibility issues, it's primarily about the HTML used. But do frontend developers actually know HTML these days?
I wish I were overstating the degree to which this has become an issue. But when I regularly talk to “full-stack developers” who don’t know how to write an unordered list or who don’t know that you can’t nest a button inside of a link, I’m convinced that the term “full-stack” has always been meaningless.
Aria-activedescendant is not focus | Sarah Higley
@codingchaos@vis.social with everything there is to know about aria-activedescendant, and more!
This is an attribute that is entirely concerned with screen reader accessibility. Specifically, it allows certain scoped exceptions to the screen reader behavior of only enabling interaction with a single element at a time.
The thing about ARIA is that it does not affect browser behavior or functionality -- only semantics and accessibility API mappings. All keyboard events will still fire on the true focused element, and there are no global DOM methods to query the currently relevant active descendant in the manner of document.activeElement. The only context in which the active descendant behaves like a second focus is when it comes to a screen reader's virtual cursor.
Even for screen readers, aria-activedescendant is not entirely the same as a second focus.
A11y at Work: When Team Opinions Differ
By @a11yMel@front-end.social
Shopify, accessibility lawsuits & 'Compliance' - Nic Chan
A view into the accessibility self-declaration of the default Shopify theme by @NicMakesStuff@indieweb.social.
WCAG2ICT Note Published
Guidance on Applying WCAG 2 to Non-Web Information and Communications Technologies (WCAG2ICT) is a completed W3C Group Note. WCAG2ICT describes how Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) principles, guidelines, and success criteria can be applied to non-web information and communications technologies (ICT), specifically to non-web documents and software. The document includes guidance for WCAG 2.0, 2.1, and 2.2 success criteria and glossary terms. WCAG2ICT has been a key resource for including WCAG in ICT accessibility regulation, legislation, and standards around the world. This update facilitates further adoption of WCAG 2.1 and WCAG 2.2 in non-web contexts. For an introduction, see: WCAG2ICT Overview.
WCAG2ICT describes how Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) principles, guidelines, and success criteria can be applied to non-web information and communications technologies (ICT), specifically to non-web documents and software.
How Dave Grohl & Foo Fighters Put Actual Lives at Risk
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The Complete Guide to Captioned Videos
By @MerylEvans@mastodon.social
Combating Access Trauma. – Robert Kingett
By @weirdwriter@tweesecake.social
Paragraphs | scottohara.me
@scottohara@mastodon.social about paragraphs. Because of course.
How To Use Invert Colors With Low Vision | Veroniiiica
How to invert colors for displays to improve visual contrast, and examples of how I use Smart Invert and Classic Invert with low vision
Low Vision Assistive Technology For Discussion Board Posts
Here is a list of strategies for accessing discussion board posts for online classes with low vision assistive technology
Discussion board posts are a key part of college experiences, especially in online classes and in graduate school programs. I love discussion boards because I often learn so much from students and instructors alike about different topics, problem solving ideas, and areas of interest, but most discussion board posts and interfaces are inaccessible to me as a student with low vision, as they often require a lot of reading or block other reading extensions or tools that I use in other contexts. Here are examples of how I use low vision assistive technology and accessibility tools for discussion board posts, based on my experiences taking 60+ online classes across multiple platforms.
Foundations: labelling text fields with input and label - TetraLogical
In this post about forms, we explore how to effectively label text fields using `` and `` elements to create form inputs that are both accessible and user-friendly.
Forms play a key role in making the web interactive. They enable people to enter and submit data for various purposes such as logging into accounts, making purchases, filling out surveys and so on. So people know how to interact with forms, form fields must have a label.
A Quick-ish Accessibility Review: shadcn/ui Charts | Ashlee M Boyer
My personal analysis after a few keyboard & screen reader tests.
This article is a few hours of free labor and close to half of what I'd charge for a 1-week sprint in a contract. This is to say I spent valuable time and limited energy doing work that should paid good money. I'm not saying it has to be me, but it should be someone with expertise in accessibility.
80 / 20 accessibility
By @marcus@mastodon.social
Specifically, I feel 80% of the barriers found in, for example, an audit are aspects that are based on a few fundamentals on the one hand, but are also easy to fix on the other.
80/20-Barrierefreiheit
Von @marcus@mastodon.social
Before Filing that Keyboard Bug…
Ensure proper testing conditions on Apple devices.
By @aardrian@toot.cafe
Spoiler Alert: it needs to be accessible | scottohara.me
By @scottohara@mastodon.social