All posts by AlastairC

Oddities in color perception

I've seen a few posts/tweets recently highlighting apparent issues in the colour-contrast testing for the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, but it isn't quite that simple.

An article from Evan Minto did the rounds on Medium a while ago: "Pixels vs. Ems: Users DO Change Font Size", and I posted a couple of comments which I'd rather didn't disappear so I'll summarise them here.

Firefox zoom preferences

Firefox’s default zoom preferences are ok, but if you want what Chrome & Edge provide (more than 300% zoom), you need to fiddle with it.

Increasing the maximum zoom

In the about:config page, you can increase the maximum zoom level from 300% with two values:

zoom.maxPercent, and set to…

Is text sizing dead?

I was listening to Shop Talk show 287, where Chris and Dave were wondering about the old mantras about text-sizing / media queries not being in pixels, I think I can help with this.

I’m one of the many people working on WCAG 2.1, and specifically with people …

EME Misdirection

The EFF post on EME is an awesome bit of misdirection.

Everything it says about DRM is true. Almost everything it says about the W3C is either false or misdirection, applying one set of arguments to another target. (Some background on EME if this doesn’t make any sense.)

I …

London Accessibility Meetup #6

I attended the 6th London Accessibility meetup, and the 1st organised by Alistair Duggin. It was a great event, with three speakers (for two talks). I took some rough notes that might be useful until the videos are published.

Both talks are about incorporating accessibility at large organisations, the …

EME at the W3C

There's an ongoing kerfuffle about DRM (Digital Rights Management) being implemented in browsers and whether the W3C should publish a standard ('recommendation') that provides access to DRM content.

The responsive order conflict for keyboard focus

We’re starting to hit a problem with the new CSS methods (Flexbox and Grid), and how people using a keyboard (or equivalent) interact with a page. I’m not the first to say the keyboard order should follow the CSS, but I’d like to highlight some recent examples from work …

Units for Media Queries – different conclusion

This is a reply to a post on zellwk.com concluding that “So.. I’m sorry to break your bubble, pixel fans, but it’s a no-go for pixel based queries.”

There are a few problems, and with the same data I come to a different conclusion.

I created what I think is …

Graphics Contrast

An overview of the potential Graphics Contrast criteria for WCAG 2.1, and a request for examples.