This post is part of RSS Club, rewarding those who still use RSS to read and/or share content. These posts are embargoed from my regular post feed and the socials for an arbitrary number of weeks. You can see all the RSS-only posts at AdrianRoselli.com/category/RSS. Tell your fri … | Continue reading
Spanned table headers are not well supported across screen readers. While you can visually style these all sorts of ways to make the spanning clear, I am focusing on the programmatic outcomes. Which essentially means how they are exposed to screen reader users. This post uses onl … | Continue reading
Automated accessibility testing tools cannot test 100% of WCAG. This position is not controversial. Other than overlay vendors, no automated tool maker makes that claim. This is partly because WCAG is targeted at humans, not code, and so nuance and context apply. Free automated a … | Continue reading
As the world’s leading expert on a people-first approach to computer vision, I am dedicated to providing insights that enable designers, developers, and copywriters to create accessible images at the highest possible velocity. A velocity so high, in fact, you can almost hear the … | Continue reading
First, a very important qualifier — this does not represent how Braille display users experience the web. All this post does is show how to enable the Braille display emulators in JAWS and VoiceOver. This can be handy when testing issues reported by users and you do not have a… | Continue reading
There is a non-zero chance that WCAG Success Criterion 4.1.1 Parsing will go away in WCAG 2.2. This isn’t a problem for users, regardless of the problems it may pose for the WCAG process, ACT rules, automated testing tools, or ossified testing processes. The joke here is using an … | Continue reading
TL;DR: Description list support is generally good (with Safari being the outlier), even if you may not like how it is supported. This post builds on my 2020 tests when iOS 14 finally added (partial) support for description lists (VoiceOver on iOS 14 Supports Description Lists). T … | Continue reading
It’s a dice advent calendar. I have no idea how five Platonic Solids and some D10s will carry for 24 days, but I am going to fine out. Web developers around the world have for years given a nod to Saturnalia solstice Isaac Newton’s birthday Yule wassailing mummering end of… | Continue reading
TL;DR: Support for aria-readonly is nearly non-existent for the roles I tested. Should you need it, you cannot rely on it. You will be better off revising the pattern where you think you need it. For some background, the aria-readonly property: Indicates that the element is not e … | Continue reading
Now that it is a market differentiator to talk about accessibility in projects, that’s all many do — talk about it. In a sea of pop-dev noise, “accessibility” can be claimed with little risk someone will challenge it. If someone does, the response is often a fine balance between … | Continue reading
“Tires are foundational to all our concept cars! You can tell because we left a wheel well to hold one!” A common refrain I see from companies is a variation of “Accessibility is a core principle!” They will include it in messaging, brag about their team, talk about how great… | Continue reading
I presented this talk for the 2022 installment of WordPress Accessibility Day, a model very much influenced by the ID24 event — 24 hours solid of online talks. Once the video is posted I will link and/or embed it here. The rest of this post is a collection of images,… | Continue reading
The slides for my talk are available as a | Continue reading
I had the pleasure / terror of presenting a table-top RPG presentation at this year’s accessibility Toronto gaming (#a11yTOgaming) event. My 0riginal PowerPoint presentation, which includes my speaker notes / ignored script as well as the videos (79MB). Or grab the much smaller v … | Continue reading
Owing to a last minute cancellation, I had the pleasure of presenting at Inclusive Design 24, a live streaming 24-hour solid conference. In the interest of full disclosure, I am also an organizer and a sponsor. I had to step away from hosting duties to give the talk and then… | Continue reading
Thanks to a conversation on the A11y Slack, I ran desktop browsers and screen readers through a test to see how they announce content marked up as superscript and subscript. I spun up an old demo from mid-2018 for a quick test: See the Pen HTML Buddies: sub & sup… | Continue reading
Another post where I lay it all out in the title. What follows is why I am making this assertion (with a handy table of contents). Timeline 26 May 2022 at 10:58am ET 26 May 2022 at 7:56pm ET 27 May 2022 at 7:38pm ET 28 May 2022 at 5:04pm… | Continue reading
I need your help. Legal documents are common on the web. Each site that has a Terms of Service written in impenetrable and indecipherable legalese, like this sentence, delights in that complexity to dissuade users from reading it and realizing just what they are giving up. “Am”, … | Continue reading
The U.S. Federal Trade Commission on August 11, 2022 announced it is exploring rules cracking down on commercial surveillance and lax data security practices. The sub-heading of that press release plainly states it is seeking public comment on harms from the business of collectin … | Continue reading
If you build calendars on the web and abbreviate the days in the column headings (you do use column headings, yeah?), this is how it sounds to a JAWS user. Sorry, your browser doesn’t support embedded videos, but don’t worry, you can download it. The caption file is also availabl … | Continue reading
Dear sighted reader, I want you to read this post without looking at the images. Each has been hidden in a disclosure. Instead, read the alternative text I provide and visualize how it may look. Then read the automatically generated alternative text, and try to visualize it then. … | Continue reading
This post is part of RSS Club, rewarding those who still use RSS to read and/or share content. These posts are embargoed from my regular post feed and the socials for an arbitrary number of weeks. You can see all the RSS-only posts at AdrianRoselli.com/category/RSS. Tell your fri … | Continue reading
This post is part of RSS Club, rewarding those who still use RSS to read and/or share content. These posts are embargoed from my regular post feed and the socials for an arbitrary number of weeks. You can see all the RSS-only posts at AdrianRoselli.com/category/RSS. Tell your fri … | Continue reading
I ran a highly scientific and well-scoped Twitter poll (yes, sarcasm) to ask a question that has been in the back of my head for some time: When you see a claim that an automated accessibility testing tool finds X% of issues, what do you believe the word ‘issues’ means… | Continue reading
It was late 2020 when I last tested how browsers use CSS display properties to break the semantics of elements. I had been waiting for Safari to fix how it handles display: contents for four years now, and was excited when the announcement came in June. Then I started testing… | Continue reading
It’s 2022 and people are still afraid to use and . I understand the layout challenges can be frustrating, but swapping to an ARIA group role will result in a more inaccessible experience. A Solution Try this: Choose Choose […] legend:not(:focus):not(:active) { position: absolu … | Continue reading
At the start of 2016 I wrote Internet Explorer Does Not Go Away Today because back then IE up to version 11 was being retired. But not Internet Explorer 11. I asked an AI (Neural Blender) to give me a picture of the Internet Explorer logo on fire. It’s almost… | Continue reading
I have spent a few years banging on about ensuring scrolling areas on a page are accessible to keyboard-only users. This is partly because the term “keyboard” maps to other input types that we distill to “keyboard” for ease of reference (speech input, sip-and-puff, on-screen keyb … | Continue reading
For context on the title, working backward from the end, GAAD is Global Accessibility Awareness Day. Its purpose, as explained at accessibility.day, is to get everyone talking, thinking and learning about digital access/inclusion and people with different disabilities. A11yship i … | Continue reading
The proposed WCAG version 2.2 has gone through a bunch of revisions since I covered the first draft in 2020. One new success criterion that persisted is 2.5.8 Target Size (Minimum) at Level AA (its name changed from “Pointer Target Spacing”). For background, WCAG 2.1 introduced 2 … | Continue reading
I made some pointless things again. The First One See the Pen Best viewed in… by Adrian Roselli (@aardrian) on CodePen. A spinning box for each word is not exactly a compelling interface element, I admit, but I based it off this old tweet that was sitting around in a… | Continue reading
Others in this sorta-series: Under-Engineered Custom Radio Buttons and Checkboxen Under-Engineered Toggles Under-Engineered Toggles Too Under-Engineered Text Boxen Under-Engineered Responsive Tables Under-Engineered Select Menus Under-Engineered Dependency Questions This post is … | Continue reading
On Tuesday April 5, 2022, a FedEx driver dropped off an overnight envelope from Manhattan. It contained a three page Cease & Desist letter from Cozen O’Connor, the law firm representing AudioEye, Inc. On Thursday April 14, 2022, I received a follow-up letter by the same delivery … | Continue reading
This post is part of RSS Club, rewarding those who still use RSS to read and/or share content. These posts are embargoed from my regular post feed and the socials for an arbitrary number of weeks. You can see all the RSS-only posts at AdrianRoselli.com/category/RSS. Tell your fri … | Continue reading
If you have little experience with ARIA, screen readers, or testing in general, understanding accessible descriptions can be trickier than understanding accessible names (already confusing for many). I have written explanations so many times for clients and in fora that I opted t … | Continue reading
Honoring April Fools’ Day I have created a foolishly responsive accordion control. Typically a responsive effort shoehorns a large pattern into a narrow viewport, often based on iDevice screen sizes. Less typically a responsive layout will also consider viewport height, and far l … | Continue reading
This post is only visible to RSS feed readers, unless you got here by manually parsing the feed (weirdo) or someone shared the link with you (they probably should not have). It is part of RSS Club, rewarding those who still use RSS to read and/or share content. You can… | Continue reading
This post is only visible to RSS feed readers, unless you got here by manually parsing the feed (weirdo) or someone shared the link with you (they probably should not have). It is part of RSS Club, rewarding those who still use RSS to read and/or share content. You can… | Continue reading
Photo courtesy Steve Faulkner, taken outside the CSUNATC 2022 venue after we had chicken and rice, free from the food desert of the venue. Who has two thumbs and is not a lawyer? For years I have worked with clients who refer to digital/web accessibility as ADA work. They have… | Continue reading
Disclaimer: This post and the headline is my opinion. I provide verifiable facts throughout to inform that opinion. I am also not a lawyer and this post does not constitute legal advice. FACIL’iti is one of many vendors that claims its accessibility overlay product can make your … | Continue reading
A collection of images, videos, tweets, articles, and links referenced in my a11y NYC talk in March 2022. This may not make much sense if you did not attend the talk. Or even if you did. Intro I had the title before I had the content. I tried to shoehorn… | Continue reading
The required set of radio buttons. The white whale to many a developer who is trying their darnedest to ensure they are conveyed accessibly while not also making it sound like every individual radio button must be toggled. 1961 Cadillac Wonderbar dashboard radio by Nicholas Lucie … | Continue reading
Data tables need column headers. Monolitten, a granite column of humans (each with a head) at Vigelandsanlegget, a sculpture park in Frognerparken in Oslo, Norway. What they probably do not need is a new set of column headers every few rows, particularly not when they change the … | Continue reading
The online holiday shopping coupled with my need to make a new invoice template got me looking at a common table structure that is harder to expose to screen readers than it seems at first glance. One I first coded in, checks watch, 1997 when I was an ecommerce developer… | Continue reading
This post is only visible to RSS feed readers, unless you got here by manually parsing the feed (weirdo) or someone shared the link with you (they probably should not have). It is part of RSS Club, rewarding those who still use RSS to read and/or share content. You can… | Continue reading
This post is only visible to RSS feed readers, unless you got here by manually parsing the feed (weirdo) or someone shared the link with you (they probably should not have). It is part of RSS Club, rewarding those who still use RSS to read and/or share content. You can… | Continue reading
Others in this sorta-series: Under-Engineered Custom Radio Buttons and Checkboxen Under-Engineered Toggles Under-Engineered Toggles Too Under-Engineered Text Boxen Under-Engineered Select Menus A common interface pattern allows users to choose one item from a pre-defined set of c … | Continue reading