June 12, 2023 • Issue #348

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Featured: The only accessibility specialist in the room

“It’s hard being the only one in your organisation or team responsible for accessibility. If that sounds familiar, I salute you, and this one’s for you.

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the challenges you face and some of the ways you can approach these, which I thought I’d throw into a post.”

Read more of The only accessibility specialist in the room.

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News, resources, tools and tutorials

• The problem with automatically focusing the first input and what to do instead (blog post - adamsilver.io)
• Insights: AI and accessibility (blog post - makeitfable.com)
• Exploring universal and cognitive-friendly UX design through pivot tables and grids (blog post - smashingmagazine.com)
• Accessibility testing – Pay attention to the details! (blog post – convergeaccessibility.com)
• Illustrating for accessibility: enhancing digital experiences for colorblind users (blog post – uxdesign.cc
• 300ms faster: Reducing Wikipedia’s total blocking time (blog post – nray.dev)
• Modern way of serving images (blog post - kurtextrem.de)
• Accessibility and artificial intelligence (blog post – joedolson.com)
• Testing sites and apps with blind users: A cheat sheet (blog post – smashingmagazine.com)
• Datalist over ARIA combobox (blog post – webaxe.org)
• Sticky content: focus in view (blog post – tetralogical.com)
• No, ‘AI’ will not fix accessibility (blog post – adrianroselli.com)
• Five accessibility bugs GitHub Copilot offers to create (blog post – mallonbacka.com)
• Are JavaScript libraries really that bad for performance? (blog post – gomakethings.com)

New to A11y

Meryl Evans shares what baking can teach us about accessibility. I like the analogy that Meryl makes here, saying that “Recipes and accessibility guidelines provide the minimum.” Recipes don’t get really good until you alter them and make them your own. Accessibility works like that too, especially at the organizational level.