Accessibility

Please, if your team cannot explain how the thing satisfies all WCAG Success Criteria at Level AA, then don’t release the thing. If the thing is a new feature for the web platform (HTML, CSS, ARIA, SVG, etc.), then don’t even propose the thing until you have its WCAG conformance sorted.

This talk, article, is for anyone who’s ever said “we need to make this accessible,” and got ignored, brushed off, or told, “We’ll do that later.” If you’re not in a leadership role, if you’re not officially “the accessibility person,” but you still want to drive change, this is for you.

So, there you have it. CSS Carousels are highly experimental, not currently accessible, and therefore, not ready for production.

building the theme has been a delicate balance of trying to manage merchant expectations with creating an accessible user experience.

Our marquee component has a pause button, respects the user preference for reduced motion, only enables focus for the first unique instance of a link, and only announces the first instance of the text. While there are certainly things that I think can be improved, a huge amount of effort was put in to make sure that disabled users would not be blocked by it. Marquees are not great for accessibility, but one that has considered accessibility is certainly better than one without.

NOBODY is saying that automated tools are not useful, only that they cannot provide comprehensive coverage of WCAG 2.2 criteria.

Many standards, especially in the last decade, don’t just streamline implementation: They open up whole new creative possibilities! CSS grid and subgrid, high-gamut color, container queries, scroll-driven animations, view transitions, color schemes and more!

Some of these ideas make it into design tools, but the wait can be long… understandably so, making interfaces for this stuff is hard! By the time Figma introduced their flexbox equivalent, the more powerful CSS Grid was already years into baseline availability.

Most HTML elements want to Elasti-Girl their way through any viewport size.

And can we talk about the awesomeness that is dev tools? In any modern browser, developers (or curious nerds of any discipline) can inspect every size, color and property of every single element of the page without any additional effort from the designer. Super-powered design specs, absolutely free.

With no known public communications from Disability:IN on the rename, it’s reasonable to believe the tool is being renamed to change its acronym from DEI to DI because of the Trump Adminstration’s barrage of anti-DEI (short for Diversity Equity and Inclusion) actions.

The ARIA tooltip role is functionally useless and semantically meaningless. The only legitimate use-case for tooltips is to show information that’s already accessibly defined. So tooltips only benefit sighted users, and are therefore presentational.

I get very frustrated with people that try and tell me I am wrong that PDFs are not the problem because frankly it’s always someone that makes a living teaching PDF remediation and or creating PDFs for others that are the ones saying this. They do not live with the inaccessible documents I have in my everyday life. It’s hard to always have to fight to read something and I am Telling you we need to solve this problem now.

What other programmers might say dismissively is something HTML lovers embrace: Anyone can do it. Whether we’re using complex frameworks or very simple tools, HTML’s promise is that we can build, make, code, and do anything we want.

In fact, HTML is the most significant computing language ever developed. Underestimate it at your peril.

Perfection is the enemy By default or death Parity is paramount Design for implementation Structure first Use your words Tools are not identities Less is less Fishing, not fish No points for performance Help evil to fail

You might think this feels like vindication, but it does not.

Sure, it’s nice to be validated by the FTC after 5 years of shouting to anyone who will listen that accessiBe is a net harm for the disability community. But the settlement is a pittance.

Reports put accessiBe’s 2024 revenue at $51.3 million. The settlement has a fine of $1 million. Subtracted from its 2024 revenue, that leaves accessiBe with $50.3 million dollars for the year. Dollars earned by lying to customers, misrepresenting itself to the community, and arguably harming disabled users.

TL;DR: Description list support continues to be generally good (with VoiceOver still the outlier), even if you may not like how it is supported.