All posts by AlastairC

WCAG 3, increment or overhaul?

It’s charter time for the Accessibility Guidelines Working Group, well, in 6 months, but we have to start the planning well in advance!

The charter (see the last charter) defines what we work on, and to some degree how we work on it. A question the group is considering …

CSUN 2025 conference notes

The CSUN ATC conference is one of the largest accessibility related conferences in the world. (It stands for “California State University in Northridge”, the conference name is actually “Assistive Technology Conference”.)

I’m going to give my impressions of the conference and talks in roughly chronological order, so read on if …

Cryptocurrency thoughts

Steph McGovern and Robert Peston on The Rest is Money were were asking for people’s thoughts about cryptocurrency. I bought 19 bitcoin in early 2011 (for £11 each) I’ve thought about the technology, and the value, quite a lot.

Why doesn’t AI work for producing accessible code?

The short answer to the title is: Accessibility is not an average.

For a longer answer, read on.

When I run training a common refrain is: Computers don’t know what is appropriate. I illustrate that with a picture of a dog, and showing an alt text of “cat”.

Picture of a dog withe the sign alt=cat above it.

Historically accessibility …

Accessibility improvements for user-agents

I’ve written about the accessibility-gap on the user-agent side before (back in 2007!), I thought it a useful time for an update. I’m trying to answer the question: What could user-agents (primarily browsers in this case) do to improve the experience of websites for people with disabilities?

You never know, …

Focus Appearance thoughts

This article was based on a previous draft of WCAG 2.2 and is no longer valid. I’m keeping it here for posterity, outlining the good ideas from the previous version, even though it was not thought practical in all cases.

I think it is fair to say that some folks …

WCAG – Priority of Constituencies

There's a concept, originally from WHATWG I think, that might be worth translating for accessibility in a guidelines context: Priority of Constituencies.

Overlay comments

There was a W3C session called “Accessibility at the Edge“, essentially trying to tackle the technical aspects of accessibility overlays. I’ll add links to the session and video if & when that is published.

I just wanted to capture my main point:

From a first principles point of

Accessibility auditing and pushing for more

A great article by Eric Bailey crossed my twitter stream: "Accessibility auditing and ego". It triggered a couple of thoughts I would like to "yes and...".

Sound and Vision quality

I love good films and TV, and I have a middle-age wish to watch (and listen) to the best versions of the current cultural stories that I like.