A11y with Ady: June 2021
Introduction:
I hereby dub the first Tuesday of the month as “Accessibility Tuesday”, so;
Welcome to the third a11y with Ady, the birthday edition as it is my birthday soon. Nothing to do with the newsletter, just in case you wanted to get me a present. :)
I hope you enjoy it and find something useful and I’m happy to hear any feedback or thoughts or anything you would like to hear more about from the world of accessibility.
General:
I look forward to reading the WebAIM Million report each time in the hopes to see the figures of accessibility issues with the top 1 million website home pages improve. While there have been some small improvements it is very slow progress. Some highlights and link to the full article below.
The number of detectable accessibility errors was 51.4 on average per home page. This was an improvement from 60.9 errors just one year ago.
97.4% of home pages had detectable WCAG 2 failures. This was a small improvement from 98.1% in 2020.
Home pages most commonly had low contrast text, missing alternative text, missing form input labels, empty links, missing document language, and empty buttons.
We must also remember that the survey was done using the WAVE Tool which can only cover approx 35/40% of issues. (https://wave.webaim.org/) also available as an extension.
https://webaim.org/blog/webaim-million-2021/
An interesting take on accessibility issues being a problem for everyone. While I definitely don’t disagree with this sentiment it is really important to remember that for every person who is inconvenienced by an accessibility issue there someone (or many someones) who can’t complete the task because of it. For some people accessibility is vital, for many it is an added bonus. Don’t prioritise one over the other but do read this interesting article.
https://a11y-collective.com/blog/blind-people-dont-visit-my-website/
Compliance:
W3.org have updated their guidance on making content more accessible for neurodiverse people. These go above and beyond compliance required for meeting WCAG but are important. As I highlight in my Accessibility Quadrants available in this article, accessibility is more than just compliance. It is very much about inclusion. https://www.thebigtesttheory.com/blog/2019/5/13/my-first-experiences-with-accessibility-testing
Abstract from the page:
This document is for people who make web content (web pages) and web applications. It gives advice on how to make content usable for people with cognitive and learning disabilities. This includes, but is not limited to: cognitive disabilities, learning disabilities (LD), neurodiversity, intellectual disabilities, and specific learning disabilities.
This document has content about:
people with cognitive and learning disabilities,
aims and objectives for usable content,
design patterns (ways) to make content usable,
including users in design and testing activities, and
personas (examples) and user needs.
The objectives and patterns presented here provide supplemental guidance beyond the requirements of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines WCAG [WCAG22]. Following this guidance is not required for conformance to WCAG [WCAG22]. However, following this guidance will increase accessibility for people with cognitive and learning disabilities.
https://www.w3.org/TR/coga-usable/
While it is interesting that there are improvements to the guidelines in the pipeline, not everyone believes that should be the current focus. When I started I found it really hard to get to grips with the guidelines. The thousands of pages of information, understanding the language used etc. As a tester I found it easier to understand the different needs of users and work back to the guidelines. I can imagine for developers trying to find information there would be even harder.
As Rian Rietveld, a senior accessibility consultant at Level Level, says in her blog post;
One concern is that the specifications and documentation online are inaccessible, unreadable, duplicated, confusing , unnecessarily overcomplicated and cluttered.
Another concern is the addition of new Success Criteria before the existing ones have been properly understood, documented and implemented.
https://level-level.com/blog/we-need-to-talk-about-wcag/
Technical:
ARIA or Accessible Rich Internet Applications are a set of attributes that define ways to make web content and web applications (especially those developed with JavaScript) more accessible.
The trouble is, bad ARIA is more often than not worse than no ARIA. Apex 4X is a comprehensive ARIA development suite, including a core collection of powerful ARIA development utilities and functions, plus a full index of scalable ARIA design pattern templates. It also includes two APIs that are specifically designed to enhance and facilitate advanced ARIA development.
It does not require prior knowledge of ARIA to implement. Moreover, it includes hundreds of advanced features specifically designed to enhance the power, performance, and versatility of accessible web technologies. 4X has been in private development for 5 years, is comprehensively organized to make it easily understandable, has been thoroughly tested, and is fully documented for ease of use. WhatSock.com is now the project home page of 4X.
Bryan Garaventa (https://twitter.com/BryanEGaraventa) is a blind developer who is working on making access to accessible templates available to all to drive web accessibility forward.
Read his post or go straight to http://whatsock.com/ to learn more.
This next article is a really interesting take on shifting accessibility left, e.g. considering it earlier in the process. Sophie Beaumont who is an Accessibility Lead and Senior Software Engineer for the BBC shares her experiences. I was particularly interested in the part about UX accessibility documentation during the design phase. It makes me wonder if it could be applied wider as a design best practice?
Disability:
There was some really positive news this month as The Valuable 500 reached its initial goal of getting 500 companies to commit to disability inclusion on their board agenda, making it the world’s biggest CEO collective for disability inclusion. For more detailed information please read the article on Disability Rights UK.
https://www.disabilityrightsuk.org/news/2021/may/valuable-500-hits-its-ceo-target
Tools:
Following NVDA 2020.4 (NonVisual Desktop Access) release in February the beta version for NVDA 2021.1 is available for testing. This latest update adds support for Chromium meaning this totally free screen reader will work better on Chrome and Edge. Please remember this is a beta version for testing so if you are testing software you are better using 2020.4 until the full release.