Category Archives: Accessibility

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This article was based on a previous draft of WCAG 2.2 and is no longer valid.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...".

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.

Pixels vs Ems commentary

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 …