Every now and then, I find that I’ve accumulated a bunch of links about various things I find interesting. Accessibility is one of those things! Here’s a list of related links to other articles that I’ve been saving up and think are worth sharing.
- Myths about Web Accessibility — Alvaro Montoro covers some classics. My favorite is “accessibility is for people with disabilities.” Accessibility is for people with disabilities, because they are people, and accessibility is for people.
- Accessibility Myths — Speaking of myths, Sergei Kriger built this entire site for them. I’ll cherry pick “Accessibility can be achieved by only adding ARIA attributes”, which is famously wrong as the first rule of ARIA is not using it.
- Form fields in depth — While perhaps not specifically about accessiblity, forms are among the most crucial things to get accessibility right on and go wrong far too often. This new guide from Google incorporates accessibility throughout and gets specifically into it as well.
- Accessibility Maze — Build by the Digital Education Strategies team in The G. Raymond Chang School of Continuing Education at Ryerson University. So fun! You can (and largely have to) play the whole game on the keyboard.
- HTML focusgroup attribute — You know how when you’ve focused on one of the radio buttons in a group of radio buttons, then you can use the arrow keys to move between them? Or how the up/down arrows work to navigate the items of a native select? You could call that “focus group navigation”, and unfortuantely we can’t tap into that behavior whenever we want to. But what if we could with something as simple as a
focusgrupattribute in HTML? That’d be cool, someday. - Adding A Dyslexia-Friendly Mode To A Website — I always think of the Dyslexie font, but clearly there is a lot more to it than just using the right font. A lot more spacing, especially typographically, and less clutter is helpful. See the demo. A somewhat rare use-case of
word-spacingin use there. Note there is some pushback to this article via Gareth Ford Williams. - How many people with disabilities use our site? — Hidde de Vries says it’s probably not a big number, but that doesn’t matter (love the quote from Tim Cook). Still, if you need to find a business upside, Hidde points out a report that cites 15-20% of the world’s population has a disability.
- 🎥 Building The Most Inaccessible Site Possible — Manuel Matuzovic proves you can get 100’s across the board on a Lighthouse test and yet make an entirely unusable site. It’s like learning in reverse. If you know what causes problems, you know how not to do those things.
