Accessibility has always been a slightly unsettling realm for web developers. Surrounded with myths, misunderstandings and contradicting best practices, it used to be a domain for a small group of experts who would "add" accessibility on top of the finished product.
Today we’re privileged to announce our brand new book on inclusive design patterns, written by Heydon Pickering, with... Read More
Some well-established web design basics: minimize the number of choices that someone has to make; create self-explanatory navigation tools; help people get to what they're looking for as quickly as possible. Sounds simple enough? Now consider this…
An ever growing number of web users around the world are living with dementia. They have very varied levels of computer literacy and may be... Read More
I’ve been a web developer for 15 years, but I’d never looked into accessibility. I didn’t know enough people with (serious) disabilities to properly understand the need for accessible applications and no customer has ever required me to know what ARIA is. But I got involved with accessibility anyway – and that’s the story I’d like to share with you today.
At the Fronteers Conference in... Read More
As creators of the web, we bring innovative, well-designed interfaces to life. We find satisfaction in improving our craft with each design or line of code. But this push to elevate our skills can be self-serving: Does a new CSS framework or JavaScript abstraction pattern serve our users or us as developers?
If a framework encourages best practices in development while also improving... Read More
It's one thing to create a web application and quite another to create an accessible web application. That's why Heydon Pickering, both author and editor at Smashing Magazine, wrote an eBook Apps For All: Coding Accessible Web Applications, outlining the roadmap for the accessible applications we should all be making.
Picture the scene: it’s a day like any other and you’re at your desk,... Read More
Web accessibility is about people. Successful web accessibility is about anticipating the different needs of all sorts of people, understanding your fellow web users and the different ways they consume information, empathizing with them and their sense of what is convenient and what frustratingly unnecessary barriers you could help them to avoid.
Armed with this understanding,... Read More
Not long after I started working at the BBC, I fielded a complaint from a screen reader user who was having trouble finding a favorite show via the BBC iPlayer’s home page. The website had recently undergone an independent accessibility audit which indicated that, other than the odd minor issue here and there, it was reasonably accessible.
I called the customer to establish what exactly... Read More
It’s an exciting time for web APIs, and one to watch out for is the Web Speech API. It enables websites and web apps not only to speak to you, but to listen, too. It’s still early days, but this functionality is set to open a whole array of use cases. I’d say that’s pretty awesome.
In this article, we’ll look at the technology and its proposed usage, as well as some great examples of how... Read More
When you browse your favorite website or check the latest version of your product on your device of choice, take a moment to look at it differently. Step back from the screen. Close your eyes slightly so that your vision is a bit clouded by your eyelashes. Can you still see and use the website? Are you able to read the labels, fields, buttons, navigation and small footer text? Can you imagine... Read More
