June 24, 2024 • Issue #402

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Hey everyone. I'm adding something back I tried in the past. Deep dives! A guest curator will collect five links around a specific topic. I want to bring other voices and perspectives into the newsletter, particularly folks with disabilities and others who aren’t like me. I’d also love to find folks newer to the field. If you have ideas for curators or topics, please let me know. Also, I'd love for you to hit reply and tell me what you think of this addition to the newsletter. I'm planning a few out over the course of the year, so we'll see how it goes. Thanks for subscribing, and caring about making your work more accessible and inclusive.

Featured: Alt text selfies

"... a celebration and collection of alt text selfies — self-portrait descriptions that are shared online."

Read more of Alt text selfies.

Sponsored: Clearing the Digital Ramp: Practical advice and perspectives on website accessibility

A regular dose of news, advice, and opinions from the team at Mangrove, where inclusive and accessible website design has been a focal point for nearly 20 years.

Subscribe for provocative opinions about web accessibility and design.

News, resources, tools and tutorials

• What does aria-hidden=true actually do to interactive elements? (blog post) - cerovac.com/a11y)
• Blazing fast websites with speculation rules (blog post - debugbear.com)
• Web Without Women (resource) - nowebwithoutwomen.com)
• The Supreme Court’s latest gun ruling—and why it may affect web accessibility (blog post) - convergeaccessibility.com)
• Your eight-step PDF accessibility checklist (blog post) - deque.com)
• foreveryone.design (blog post – foreveryone.design)
• Intro to color contrast (blog post) – goodpractices.design
• Federal court website accessibility lawsuit filings took a dip in 2023 (blog post – adatitleiii.com)
• Hot in here: Heat waves, climate change, and disability (blog post – a11ysavvy.com

Deep dive: Handling errors

The Deep dive is a collection of links focused on a specific topic. Angela Fowler curated this month's deep dive. Angela is an accessibility consultant and the founder of Real Life Access. Totally blind since birth, she strives to be part of constructive solutions which will make the world more accessible to everyone.

The life of a screen reader user. You finally get around to completing that online form you’ve put off for days. You tab and type and select, answering all the prompts in what common sense would tell you is the correct way. You hit submit and sigh in relief at a task finally accomplished… except… when you hit submit nothing happens! It seems you made a mistake, but as you explore the page you cannot determine the error. After several minutes of double checking you manage to complete the form, but your sense of accomplishment has been replaced by one of exasperation as you think, “they could have designed that so much better!”

Accessible error handling is so important, and yet so often forgotten. The following articles will give you the information you need to save your customers endless frustration.

• A guide to accessible form validation (blog post – smashingmagazine.com)
• The Aaatomy of accessible forms: Error messages (blog post – deque.com
• How to provide accessible form error identification (blog post – levelaccess.com)
• Helping users prevent input errors (blog post – dubbot.com)
• The ultimate error message UX writing guide (blog post – theuxgal.com)

New to A11y

Karl Groves wrote a good introduction to keyboard accessibility that touches on device independence, common issues and more. Colleagues will know that I'm constantly pointing out one of these major issues across products and sites: a lack of focus indicators. It's a good measurement of if a team gets accessibility details.