Articles Tagged accessibility

Lindsey Kopacz has a wonderful blog about accessibility. I've seen a number of her articles making the rounds lately and I was like, dang I better make sure I'm subscribed. For example:

• An Introduction to ARIA States
• 3 Simple Tips to Improve Keyboard Accessibility
• Create custom keyboard accessible checkboxes

Regarding that last one, I remember learning from Sara Soueidan that a good tip for this to position them over the new custom checkboxes and hide them via opacity … Read article

The first consideration is: do you really? If you can, having text next to your icons is proven over and over again to be the most accessible and clearest UX (see Apple's latest blunder). But if you need to (and I get it, sometimes you need to), Sara Soueidan and Scott O'Hara have a pair of articles that nicely lay out all the options and present actual research on this topic.

• Sara Soueidan: Accessible Icon Buttons
• Scott O'Hara: Contextually

Semantic HTML and Accessible Rich Internet Applications (ARIA) help create interfaces that work for everyone in the most performant, robust, and simple way possible. They add essential meaning to your content, which lets web browsers, search engines, screen readers, RSS readers, and ultimately users understand it.

And yet, many people still don’t use them. I wanted to know why, so I set up a Twitter poll. The most common reason people gave was a lack of awareness and understanding … Read article

Two years ago, I wrote about prefers-reduced-motion, a media query introduced into Safari 10.1 to help people with vestibular and seizure disorders use the web. The article provided some background about the media query, why it was needed, and how to work with it to avoid creating disability-triggering visual effects.

The article was informed by other people’s excellent work, namely Orde Saunders’ post about user queries, and Val Head’s article on web animation motion sensitivity. … Read article

CSS is what gives every website its design. Websites sure aren’t very fun and friendly without it! I’ve read about somebody going a week without JavaScript and how the experience resulted in websites that were faster, though certain aspects of them would not function as expected.

But CSS. Turning off CSS while browsing the web wouldn’t exactly make the web far less usable... right? Or, like JavaScript, would some features not work as expected? Out of curiosity, I decided to … Read article