Posts tagged with ‘accessibility’

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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.

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After much anticipation and several delayed release dates, we eventually got the elusive Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2 on 5 October 2023.

For those who build websites, digital services or mobile applications, or if you just care about making the internet more accessible in general, then this is big news!

So, lets have a look at what all the fuss is about!

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I recently wrote a blog post called European Accessibility Act: What you need to know and it created a bit of a stir, and a really interesting question came up around Article 32, which is all about transitional measures.

Now, you might be thinking, 'Transitional what?' So let's dive into it together and try to make sense of it.

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The European Accessibility Act and its impact on the private sector.

Learn the differences between the EAA, EU Accessibility Directive, Public Sector Bodies Accessibility Regulations, and EN 301 549, and discover top tips to prepare your business for compliance with the EAA.

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The term ‘microservice’ is becoming more and more popular when you look across the Digital landscape of a lot of big organisations.

Several Government departments, and several large organisations I've spoken to recently, are all looking at this approach; because, if executed well, it saves time and money, and they create consistency for users.

However, as more and more organisations try to leverage microservices, the pitfalls of accessibility are perhaps not being fully considered.

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As you probably know by now, any software which is built or procured by a Public Sector Body must meet the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 to the standard of AA.

What I'm really tired of, is reading conformance reports from third party suppliers who are trying to push their inaccessible products for large sums of money under the guise that it is accessible.

These chancers often state that some of the criteria is 'partially supported', 'supported with exceptions' or any number of different ways to carefully word the fact that it does not support a particular accessibility feature.

And, it's not just one company, they're all doing it.

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There's a couple of criteria in the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines that I see catching people out time and time again. 3.1.1 Language of page and 3.1.2 Language of parts.

These two criteria are important, because they help screen readers to read out the language correctly. If your page is set to English, but some of your content is not English, then the screen reader is just going to attempt to pronounce it in English anyway, which can lead to some pretty weird results.

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It's now 2022, and I'm still seeing far too many websites using static pixel sizes for fonts. Even big hitters like Facebook do this.

Stop it!

Using the wrong units of measurement in your Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) can be a barrier for many visually impaired users.

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The number of people in the UK living with a disability is rising.

It's currently accepted that in the UK it is around 1 in 5 people, or 20%. And, from 2012 to 2019, there has been a further 3% increase in the 'official statistics'.

The number of children reported to have a disability has risen 2%, from 6% to 8%

The number of working age adults reported to have a disability has risen 3%, from 16% to 19%.

The number of adults over State Pension age reported to have a disability has risen 1%, from 45% to 46%.

Those are the facts. Based on 2011/2012 GOV.UK Disability Facts and Figures and 2019/2020 GOV.UK Family Resources Survey. The rest of this post is mainly my thoughts, and definitely up for debate!

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My initial thoughts were to decouple PA11Y from it's headless browser, and run it as part of the Selenium tests, rather than booting up 2 separate browser instances which would add seconds onto each test they could just both hit the same page when it was open.

However, on closer inspection, it turns out that using both is actually far simpler than I anticipated. PA11Y has the ability to use different 'runners' or plugins. So, using axe-core and PA11Y together is as simple as passing in the runners in as an option.