5 most annoying website features I face as a blind person every single day by Holly Tuke
Five pieces of low-hanging fruit:
- Unlabelled links and buttons
- No image descriptions
- Poor use of headings
- Inaccessible web forms
- Auto-playing audio and video
Link tags: headings
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Introduction to Screen Readers Using Voiceover | Gymnasium
This is a great short introduction to using VoiceOver with Safari by the one and only Ethan Marcotte.
Accessible HTML Elements | Amber’s Website
Amber runs through some HTML elements that help you provide semantic information—and accessibility—for your website: headings, paragraphs, lists, and more:
You may be aware that ARIA roles are often used with HTML elements. I haven’t written about them here, as it’s good to see how HTML written without ARIA can still be accessible.
5 Keys to Accessible Web Typography | Better Web Type
Some excellent explanations for these five pieces of sensible typography advice:
- Set your base font size in relative units
- Check the colour of your type and only then its contrast
- Use highly legible fonts
- Shape your paragraphs well
- Correctly use the heading levels
How to Section Your HTML | CSS-Tricks
A deep dive with good advice on using—and labelling—sectioning content in HTML: nav, aside, section, and article.
Let small include subheadings? · Issue #929 · w3c/html
Here’s an interesting proposal to slightly amend the semantics of the small element so it could apply to the use-case that hgroup was trying to cover.
Do we need a new heading element? We don’t know - JakeArchibald.com
Jake is absolutely spot-on here. There’s been a lot of excited talk about adding an h element to HTML but it all seems to miss the question of why the currently-specced outline algorithm hasn’t been implemented.
This is a common mistake in standards discussion — a mistake I’ve made many times before. You cannot compare the current state of things, beholden to reality, with a utopian implementation of some currently non-existent thing.
If you’re proposing something almost identical to something that failed, you better know why your proposal will succeed where the other didn’t.
Jake rightly points out that the first step isn’t to propose a whole new element; it’s to ask “Why haven’t browsers implemented the outline for sectioned headings?”
(I added a small historical note in the comments pointing to the first occurrence of this proposal way back in 1991.)
Responses To The Screen Reader Strategy Survey | HeydonWorks
Heydon asked screen readers some questions about their everyday interactions with websites. The answers quite revealing: if you’re using headings and forms correctly, you’re already making life a lot easier for them.
Start Building Accessible Web Applications Today - Course by @marcysutton @eggheadio
A great series of short videos from Marcy on web accessibility.
The web accessibility basics – Marco’s Accessibility Blog
Marco gives a run-down of the basics of getting accessibility right on the web. Nothing here is particularly onerous but you’d surprised how often developers get this wrong (or simply aren’t aware of it).
He finishes with a plea to avoid unnecessary complexity:
If there’s one wish I have for Christmas from the web developer community at large, it is this: Be good citizens of the web, and learn proper HTML before you even so much as touch any JavaScript framework. Those frameworks are great and offer a lot of features, no doubt. But before you use hundreds of kilobytes of JavaScript to make something clickable, you may want to try if a simple button element doesn’t do the trick just as fine!
HIKE - Introduction to accessibility concepts for the Web
It really isn’t hard to get the basics of accessibility right on the web …and yet those basics are often neglected.
Here’s a handy shortlist to run through, HIKE:
- H stands for headings and semantic markup.
- I stands for images and labels.
- K stands for keyboard navigation.
- E asks for you to ACT with a little extra love for custom components and more.
(ACT = ARIA, Colour Contrast, Text Size)
Document Outlines | HTML5 Doctor
Mike takes on the very tricky task of explaining the new outline algorithm—definitely one of the hardest features of HTML5 to explain, in my opinion.
fberriman » hgroups and sub-titles
Frances takes issue with the hgroup element in HTML5.