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I recently read a super interesting, yet slightly terrifying study, by researchers at the University of Texas at Austin, Texas A&M, and Purdue, which shows that Large Language Models (LLMs) can suffer permanent cognitive damage when they're trained on low-quality, high-engagement social media posts.

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Imagine listening to your favourite podcast. You rewind it to go over something you missed, but each time you replay it, it’s somehow different.

This sounds frustrating, right? But, it’s likely this is what would happen if we just stuffed large language models into screen readers, in a lazy attempt to avoid having to publish accessible content.

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In my opinion, "best practice" has had its day. It’s time we stop hiding behind it, and start trying to create some urgency around things we know to be accessibility issues. We need terminology that prompts action, not apathy! Because if somebody can’t use your service, it’s not "best practice", it’s a problem!

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In this post, I'll break down a real job advert and point out the things that concern me, in the hope it will help you to avoid taking on an accessibility role which is an impossible task, and likely detrimental to your health!

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I've developed a weird fascination with challenging language models, thinking up edge-case questions or scenarios to really work out if it can do what is being claimed, or whether it's just reasonably convincing on the surface.

Most language models are useful, but usually, they aren't that great once you drift outside of the realms of common knowledge and into nuanced territory.

So, since the launch of axe Assistant, I've spent a few days testing it out! This post documents my findings!

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The problem with AI, especially large language models (LLM), is that most people don't really understand how they work. This is not an accident! It's in many companies' interests to keep the mystery alive! They use smoke and mirrors to market their products as smarter, safer, or more "human" than they actually are.

As humans, we love to personify things, because our only reference point is often ourselves. When something talks like us, we assume it thinks like us too.

But, here's the blunt truth…

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W3C, the World Wide Web Consortium, released a new draft of the WAI-ARIA 1.3 specification on 23 January 2024.

If you're not familiar with it, WAI stands for the Web Accessibility Initiative, and ARIA stands for Accessible Rich Internet Applications.

It's a set of standards created to improve the accessibility of the products we build for the web, and it includes details about HTML attributes you can use to make content better for assistive technology. Some common ones you might have come across are aria-label, aria-live, and aria-describedby.

With the new draft of 1.3, we can get a bit of an idea as to what is coming, and how we can prepare for implementing and testing these features.

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Many organisations seem to view accessibility through a narrow lens. They do not recognise the breadth and depth of expertise that is required to create a well rounded accessibility role.

We had a similar situation 10 to 15 years ago, when start-ups were constantly trying to hire a single person that could do visual design, user experience (UX) design and software development.

This results in bloated job adverts hunting for somebody who likely does not exist in the job market. A mythical creature. A legend. Their reputation transcends the entire industry, yet nobody has managed to find a real one. Hence the term 'unicorn'.

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Web Chat relies on real time information and notifications, so you're going to need to use several features of Aria (Accessible Rich Internet Applications).

In this post, I'm going to cover in detail which of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) you're going to need to consider, and some examples of how you can use advanced attributes to give screen reader users the best possible experience.

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In this post, I just want to talk through what alt text is, why it matters, and how to avoid some common mistakes!

I know alt text posts are common, but I feel compelled to write it given that it's 2023, and I still see a lot of the same issues I've been seeing for years.