I learned that Accessibility Ant is not what I thought it was CSUN conference is a pilgrimage, a place where the people of disability, accessibility and the #a11yIndustry meet to talk lived reality, push abstracted accessibility solutions and products. I have been attending CSUN regularly since 2007. This year was the first time I traveled to CSUN representing TetraLogical, and not TPGi. Working remotely since 2006, conferences are a social lifeline. A time when i get to leave my home office to hide in a hotel room, for some of the time, and emerge to immerse myself in the incoming tide of th ..read more

Took a journey into the heart of the #a11y industrial complex last night while browsing the interwebs on my phone. Started on X which is fitting. Followed a link to an Open Letter about intransigence of current world leaders to deal with the coming climate bomb among other issues. The Elders, Future of Life Institute and a diverse range of co-signatories call on decision-makers to urgently address the ongoing impact and escalating risks of the climate crisis, pandemics, nuclear weapons, and ungoverned AI. Interesting reading, but was skeptical, sounded like a quasi-religious organisation “F ..read more

An ugly truth is that there are still interoperability issues with some of the native HTML controls and Screen readers. Even though these controls have been around since long before AI came to the rescue of our accessibility asses. A case in point is the expression of option group labels, AKA (Also Known As) <optgroup label="poot"> What is exposed in the accessibility tree for <select size="1"> and size=>1 still differs in some browsers (i.e. Chrome) Chrome size=1 <select> exposed as a combobox,  <optgroup> is not exposed, there is a MenuListPopup containi ..read more

updated 29/08/23 WCAG 2.2 is almost upon us, many of us have started testing the new Success Criteria for paying clients. I wanted to find a way to speed up the testing of 2.5.8 Target Size (Minimum). What I produced with the help of ChatGPT is a quick and very dirty target size bookmarklet What does it do? identifies interactive elements. works out the centre of the element. draws a semi-transparent 24×24 pixel circle based on the centre of the element. if the element has a height or width less than 24 pixels the circle is blue. if the element has a height or width 24 pixels or gr ..read more

I first tested and reported support in the critically acclaimed 2021 article hasPopup hasPoop. I then retested 09/02/2023 –  JAWS and NVDA, no change to results reported in 2021. Movement at the station latest testing… Elation The latest version of JAWS 2023 June update (released 20/6/2023) now supports all aria-haspopup values on button and link. Despondency I thought NVDA had also implemented the same support recently, but on testing it found that although support has been implemented it has not yet made it into the release version. Minimalism I also found that Narrator now announ ..read more

In 2011 when I first started thinking about how best to map the semantics of figure/figcaption to accessibility API properties, the set of properties to choose from was limited as compared to 2022. What ended up being implemented in browsers was a naming relationship between the figure element and the figcaption element. The accessible name for the figure element is provided by the content of the figcaption element. Code example Using ARIA to illustrate the information exposed natively in the Accessibility Tree for the labelledby figure/figcaption accessibility mapping. <figure role="figu ..read more

Originally published February 2020, updated in March 2021. Updated again today after reading web standards fantasy It’s actually been longer (I remember being introduced to the outline algorithm in 2007), but 12 years is a number worth signifying. In 2020 2021  2022 as it was in 2010 the HTML specification defines an outline algorithm and specifies how it affects heading rank regardless of the hard coded heading level h1...h6 and how <hgroup> automagically transforms multiple headings into a single heading. Problem is that its never been implemented, as a consequence developers tak ..read more

Like aria-label, aria-labelledby provides the opportunity for a developer to expose a short text string as the accessible name for an element. The mechanism to do so differs. While aria-label accepts a string of text, aria-labelledby accepts 1 or more id values (NOT a STRING OF TEXT). The same opportunity is afforded by native HTML labelling features, please do use the native features wherever practical!, for example: <label for="pithy">poot</label> <input type="text" id="pithy"> <img alt="creamy pie"> <button>belt on</button> aria-labelledby is one of ..read more

aria-owns is surprisingly strong magic aria-owns allows developers to restructure the parent-child relationships in the accessibility tree. This means that screen reader users may experience a different semantic structure and meaning to other users when they navigate and interact with content using their screen readers virtual/browse mode. Accessibility Tree Tree of accessible objects that represents the structure of the user interface (UI). Each node in the accessibility tree represents an element in the UI as exposed through the accessibility API; for example, a push button, a check box, o ..read more

Emojis Emojis are derived from Unicode symbols Unicode symbols do not have inbuilt text alternatives. They are exposed in the browser accessibility tree as a text symbol: The text alternatives for Unicode symbols are usually contained within a text file in screen reading software’s program files directory. For example the JAWS 2021 file for (English language) descriptions of Unicode symbols on my machine is C:\ProgramData\Freedom Scientific\JAWS\2021\SETTINGS\SymbolDescriptions\SymbolDescriptions.enu.txt Note in SymbolDescriptions.enu.txt This file contains descriptions for characters/symbo ..read more