October 3, 2022 • Issue #312

View this issue online or browse the full issue archive.

Hey there, readers! This little newsletter celebrated a birthday last week. I’ve sent something to inboxes for the better part of seven years. I’m still having fun putting this together for you each week. To mark the occasion, I’ve turned off all tracking in the newsletter. You deserve a private reading experience after all. A number of you have requested this, and I hope to keep it that way while still maintaining support from sponsored content.

What’s the best way I know you’re engaged with what I send?

• Share the newsletter with people.
• Send me links to what you’ve written or find helpful.
• Drop me a note, telling me what you like or don’t like.

Featured: Don’t overwrite visual labels with aria-label

“The aria-label property can be extremely useful when used correctly. When used incorrectly, it can wreak havoc on speech-input user experiences.”

Read more of Don’t overwrite visual labels with aria-label.

Sponsored: How to make your website accessible for people who are Deaf

Approximately 466 million people (over 5% of the world’s population) worldwide have disabling hearing loss opens a new window. This includes about 432 million adults and 34 million children.

For content creators and developers, it is essential to understand how people who are deaf use the web and how we can create web content that they can easily perceive and understand.

Read more of Sponsored: How to make your website accessible for people who are Deaf.

News, resources, tools and tutorials

• Focus appearance explained (blog post - tempertemper.net)
• 2.4.11 Focus Appearance adds more complexity to WCAG than we should want (blog post - hidde.blog)
• aria-description crash course (blog post - darins.page)
• Testing web design color contrast (blog post – web.dev)
• Earth, Wind and Fire accessibility PSA videos (video – youtube.com/c/CrystalPrestonWatson)
• A deep dive into WCAG 2.2. and beyond (podcast - relay.fm/parallel)
• Yes, accessibility is also a backend concern (blog post - ericwbailey.website)
• Unconscious biases that get in the way of inclusive design (blog post - smashingmagazine.com)
• Accessibility insights with Heather Dowdy of Netflix (webinar - abilitynet-org-uk.zoom.us)
• Attitudes to digital accessibility survey 2022 (survey - abilitynet.org.uk)

New to A11y

If you’re new to the accessibility arena, Estelle Weyl and Carie Fisher have some content for you. Estelle wrote Learn HTML and Carie created Learn accessibility. Each course includes several modules already with more to launch in the future. Both of these promise to help form the foundation of your accessibility knowledge.