October 30, 2023 • Issue #368

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Featured: So you’ve been publicly accessibility-shamed

"Could those critics have been nicer? Sure, that would have bruised my ego less. But disabled people and accessibility advocates don’t owe it to me or to anyone to be nice. If you couldn’t use 7 out of the top 15 e-commerce sites, you’d lose patience too. While tech often deflects on issues of ethics, accessibility faces that responsibility head on. To put it another way, accessibility is design and development with a built-in moral compass. So if an accessibility expert comes across as an asshole, I now assume it’s saltiness built up from years of exhaustion answering the same bullshit questions over and over like “Do blind people really matter?”… Ugh."

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Sponsored: Start documenting your accessibility, belching beaver peanut butter milk stout

In this episode, hosts Amber, Chris, and Steve discuss different types of accessibility documentation that websites and applications might use from general accessibility statements to VPATs.

Read more about Start documenting your accessibility, belching beaver peanut butter milk stout.

News, resources, tools and tutorials

• Accessibility improvements for user-agents (blog post - alastairc.uk)
• What do the exceptions in the Notice of Proposed Rulemaking for the Accessibility of Web Information for Educational Institutions mean? (blog post - equalentry.com)
• Give your site some focus! Tips for designing useful and usable focus indicators (blog post - deque.com)
• Splitting within selects (blog post – adrianroselli.com
• Test mobile assistive technology and feature support (blog post – accessibilityoz.com)
• The added value of (neuro)diversity (blog post – erikkroes.nl)
• It's 2023, here is why your web design sucks (blog post – heather-buchel.com
• Accessibility modes should be an industry standard (blog post – cbr.com)

New to A11y

You can learn about HTML5 accessibility from Steve Faulkner, one of the most knowledgeable folks on the subject. The talk is about a decade old, but most of it still holds true today. Plus, much of the advice can be used on all kinds of projects.