Accessibility | Inclusion | Belonging | DEI AF
One of the quieter but important themes at this year’s CSUN Assistive Technology Conference was cognitive accessibility. Accessibility conversations often focus on screen readers, captions, and keyboard navigation. Those are essential. But many of the barriers people face when using technology are not physical. They are cognitive. Interfaces that are confusing, overwhelming, unpredictable, or mentally […]
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I love purpose built bookmarklets that help you find problematic code. I got an email yesterday from Travis Roth (Wayback Machine) about a potential vestigial aria-hidden attribute on an otherwise visible element. Unfortunately, it’s not uncommon to find an element that has aria-hidden=”true” on an element that is visible and should have either “false” or Continue reading
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The biggest font size requirement is that the user is able to adjust their font size and the application inherits their preference. In Web, this means we use a relational font, such as em, rem, percentages, vm, and vh. Pixels are passable, but we don’t want to use points. Containers need to grow The BBC Continue reading
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I love simple bookmarklets that visualize coding patterns. I was working on a project today and wanted to verify that aria-labels were sufficiently descriptive. So I put together this quick bookmarklet. aria-label bookmarklet Simply drag that up to your bookmark bar and click on it whenever you need to test a page. If an element Continue reading
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Update: This post was originally written in 2015. The post has been updated to reflect the accessibility community has shifted from Twitter to LinkedIn and Mastadon. I’ve also removed resources that are no longer available. I had the opportunity to visit many colleges and meet with the students as a Yahoo! Developer Evangelist. During these Continue reading
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Keyboard accessibility is critical for your users that depend on voice recognition, onscreen keyboards, screen readers, ergonomic accessories, and your power users that prefer to avoid grabbing the mouse for every task. Most people test to make sure every interactive element can receive focus via the tab key and that buttons and links work with Continue reading
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Update: this was originally published in 2013 and many of the links will be outdated. Bookmarklets are small javascript links that let you perform tasks in your browser. I have collected a set of bookmarklets that allow easier accessibility testing. This collection will certainly grow. What is your favorite? Add it in the comments. To Continue reading
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Restored Article: Originally published: January 2, 2013 Restored: April 18, 2025 Introduction There’s an old programming saying: Garbage in, Garbage out. Bad input leads to bad results. Whether you’re building a website, app, or even a chocolate-covered cream puff, good practices are essential. Recently, a pattern has emerged where links are not keyboard accessible. This Continue reading
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This was originally written for the Yahoo Developer Blog in 2010 and is being restored from the Internet Archive. Open Government Data – A virtual revolution There’s a tremendous amount of government data available on the internet today. It’s an open data revolution led by the United States and the United Kingdom. This data ranges Continue reading
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@media and the WCAG2 I was waiting for the WCAG2 smack down at this week’s @media conference in London. The stage was set for some serious smack talk and WWF style-insults. Heck, Joe Clark was even mentioned at least a half dozen times. But a surprising thing happened on stage. The presenters, Gez Lemon, Patrick Continue reading
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Please note: this was originally published in 2006. YUI’s Interesting Moments spreadsheet is a great resource, especially as modern developers (using javascript platforms) have less understanding of micro-interactions. I’ve encouraged designers to use this in their specifications documents. I’ve kept internet archive links as the Yahoo articles have been deleted. Bill Scott gave an interesting Continue reading