Introduction:
Welcome to the latest edition of A11y with Ady. I hope you enjoy it and find something useful. I’m happy to hear any feedback or thoughts or anything you would like to hear more about from the world of accessibility.
Tip of the Month:
As a new feature I’m going to include one tip each month. This time it is strings.
I make no apologies if you have heard this one before as it is worth repeating and I still see this all the time.
Please capitalise strings of words! That could be HashTags #A11yWithAdy; User Names - @A11y_Ady; Emails - Ady.Stokes@Gmail.com (not a real Email)
General:
They say a picture paints a thousand words so how do you write good alternative text? The project Alt Text as Poetry has created a workbook that not only explains alt-text but explores how to improve it and even think of it as poetry. In a series of exercises, preferably with a partner, you create alternative text and yes, even poetry. Very interesting read and process.
https://alt-text-as-poetry.net/
Compliance:
I contemplated whether to put this under the general section but compliance felt the right place. I’ve seen several conversations suggesting detecting screen reader users as a way to ‘direct’ them to different flows. There are many reasons this is a bad idea and Leonie Watson summarised them excellently in this post from 2014.
https://tink.uk/thoughts-on-screen-reader-detection/
Technical:
I always say there is a lot of interesting information out there on accessibility and in many forms. Approaching it as a style guide is something I’ve not seen before. This site has styles with an explanation and markup examples.
As the site says, you can use it in lots of different ways including contributing yourself.
As a reference.
As a base for your own style guide.
As a base for creating your own accessible components.
As a base for a new accessible theme.
Contribute to the style guide and make it better.
https://a11y-style-guide.com/style-guide/
A different approach to the style guide above is the site Access Guide. Similar but from a different perspective there’s a brand new website to house the guides and more are being added. It describes itself as, “Access Guide is a friendly introduction to digital accessibility based on WCAG 2.1 (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines)” and looking at the layout and content it is hard to disagree.
https://www.accessguide.io/updates
Disability:
Understanding the different ways people interact with software is really important to considering their point of views and needs. In this self described Accessibility Ninja Rhea Althea Guntalilib tells us How a Blind Person Uses a Smartphone.
https://equalentry.com/mobile-screen-reader-101/