Blog

My thoughts on various topics, in writing.

The Dunning-Kruger effect in accessibility

Published on , in Design and development,

If you write invalid code, it throws an error. If you get the layout wrong, you can see it when it renders. But, if you build a custom component that doesn’t work with a keyboard, nothing really happens. Your unit tests pass, the page renders, and everything looks fine. So, you ship it!

The people that can’t use it usually won’t file a bug report. They’ll just close your website or delete your app. So you don’t really get any signals telling you that something is wrong. And, a lack of signals, feels a lot like you’re doing everything right!

Using maths to balance your heading styles

Published on , in Design and development,

In HTML, we have six different heading levels, and it can be a real pain to style them all in a way where they’re both identifiable and accessible.

When I say accessible, there are a few considerations. The first is that we cannot rely solely on colour to make headings visually different. This would fail 1.4.1 Use of Color, and would mean people with a colour vision deficiency, or who are “colour blind”, are at a disadvantage.

Why TalkBack keeps switching accents

Published on , in Design and development,

Here’s an interesting issue. Imagine a page, written entirely in English. The markup is setting the page language correctly using <html lang="en">. The code is clean. HTML is valid. Yet when you test it with TalkBack, it’s reading some of the content in a completely different accent.

Weird, right?

Article 50 of the EU AI Act, and what it means for you

Published on , in AI and ethics,

AI models have already started putting invisible watermarks into the content they write. So, if you use AI to write stuff for you, re-structure your own writing, or even just use it to correct your grammar, then you will likely want to know how this may affect you!

Accessibility: Start with “why”

Published on , in Strategy and leadership,

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about why accessibility initiatives are so hard. And, I’ve come to the conclusion, that more often than not, it’s not because of issues with standards. It’s also not because leaders, designers or developers lack the skills or knowledge to actually do it. I think it’s often just because of where an organisation chooses to start. And, you don’t really get a second chance to make a good first impression!

The AI strategy trap

Published on , in AI and ethics,

Right now, AI is cheap. Suspiciously cheap. Ok, maybe not to the average user who thinks £19.99 a month is quite a hefty amount to pay out for a glorified search engine, but for organisations embedding it into their ways-of-working, it’s the kind of cheap that should make you somewhat nervous, not relieved.

Because, you’re not really footing the bill.

Our CSS isn’t opinionated enough

Published on , in Design and development,

For as long as I can remember, styling classes has always been pushed as “best practice” for writing CSS. Avoid IDs because they’re too specific. Avoid styling tags directly because it’s too broad.

You can’t get away from it. It’s even baked into most of the linting tools we use every day. It’s sensible advice, but I do think it has quietly trained several generations of developers to build things that look correct, yet communicate no semantics.

Don’t forget to translate your alt text

Published on , in Design and development,

This is a common WCAG failure that can easily fly under the radar. It’s easy to miss, easy to ship, and a lot more common than you’d expect. I’ve seen it on government websites, e-commerce platforms, and well funded projects that clearly had accessibility in mind. The lang attribute is set correctly. The visible text is properly translated. But buried in the markup, the alt attributes are all hard-coded in English.

Mission impossible – a follow up!

Published on , in Strategy and leadership,

Almost a year ago, I wrote a blog post called Mission Impossible - Accessibility Job Roles. I publicly pulled apart a real job advert, and the vacancy holder reached out. What happened next is not what I expected.

5 reasons why WCAG AA compliance does not mean your website is accessible

Published on , in Standards,

There’s a common misconception, that if you meet the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2, to level AA, then your website is accessible.

WCAG 2.2 AA is often considered the holy grail and the target to aim for. When, in reality, it should just be a baseline or starting point. Because, what many people don’t realise, is that you can have a “fully-compliant” website that is inaccessible to most people.