Hey everyone!

My colleague and I are currently interning at a company in the Netherlands (very small company so they don’t have any accessibility experts), where we're focused on improving web accessibility for government institutions, particularly municipalities. We're passionate about ensuring that everyone, regardless of ability, can access and utilize digital products seamlessly.

Our project revolves around enhancing the accessibility of our company's web application, aligning with WCAG 2.1 and 2.2 standards (mostly A and AA, with a few easier AAA). To achieve this, we want to develop both automated and manual testing procedures that thoroughly evaluate accessibility features.

We understand the importance of manual testing in truly empathizing with the needs of users who rely on accessibility features. That's why we're reaching out to this community for guidance and expertise. We're seeking individuals who are well-versed in accessibility standards and experienced in manual testing methodologies and are willing to explain to us some common practices in manual testing.

If you're an accessibility expert who's passionate about making the web more inclusive, we'd love to connect with you! We're particularly interested in having a video call to gain insights into the manual testing process and understand the unique needs of users requiring accessibility features.

If you're interested in collaborating with us or know someone who might be, please reach out to us here or via direct message.

Thanks!

Technically not "web" but very similar.

I'm preparing some presentations and it's important for me that I share them in PDF/a format to ensure accessibility by all.

But, it turns out that the Mac version of PowerPoint doesn't seem to be able to do that?

Any idea what my choices are?

Hi, I'm building a website for listeners of a radio-reading service called Audio Reader of Kansas. We read magazine and local newspapers to those who cannot, and we started recording them and offering them online as an on-demand digital archive. I've designed a website that is extremely minimal and so hopefully very easy for visually impaired users. Keep in mind that most of our listeners are elderly who have lost their sight in old age and likely have not learned to use screen readers.

If anyone would like to look at it for use and report on how accessible it is, that would be really great. The URL is: http://audioreader.net/

We do have a few listeners who are skilled with screen readers and they would be able to review the new website for us too. But I was just wondering if I could get the Reddit hive-mind's opinion before I go to that next step.

Also, I would understand if you refuse to do this because there is no payment involved. I'm not asking for a professional accessibility review, though we may be interested in that in the future.

Thank you!

I really think the web is dying. I now have a whole bunch of issues to fix:

1. Discord hiding content from search bots. Kills communities that aren't small and tight in the same timezone.
2. html5 popups. Especially the ones that interrupt after you've just started reading
3. When voice input is blocked somehow, like in widgitonline.com
4. Paywall results in search results.
5. Forced ads in search results. These should be marked in the results.

I'm using kagi.com to address some of this. Perhaps PERCIVAL perceptual adblocking can fix dark patterns for those who are forced to use these sites.

Hi all! Is it acceptable for an anchor tag to have multiple block-level elements in it?

I'm thinking about how for an assistive technology user (at least with NVDA), each line (with the down/up arrow) would be read out as though it's a link. Example:

<a href="example.com">
    <p>Some text</p> <!-- read out like "link Some text" -->
    <p>Some other text</p> <!-- read out like "link Some other text" -->
</a>

Is this behaviour expected for a screen reader user that each of these lines would be part of the same link?

If there are multiple of these "block link" structures sequentially, how might a user of assistive technologies identify the differences?

Thanks in advance for your help!

For me, it's businesses who focus on compliance, rather than seeing accessibility as a core part of the user experience. Also, devs who download a screen reader and think that they're getting the same experience as a long-term user.

Hi, I'm a graphic designer, and the company I work at releases a quarterly publication that we both print out and put on ISSUU. It doesn't look like ISSUU is very accessible, like...at all, though. The pdf is converted into a flipbook, but when it does so it also looks to be converted into flat images with no live text.

I suggested releasing an accessible, screen readable pdf version along with the flipbook, but I was told we'd really like to not lose out on all the metrics that ISSUU provides, if possible. I am having a really difficult time figuring out on my own of there exists a publishing site that:

1. Retains all the accessible functionality of your pdf (I don't know the right term for this--the things like anchoring images to text and tagging the hierarchy of headings and subheads so that screen readers can still, you know, read it)
2. Provides you with statistics on things like average read time, impressions, clicks, etc.

I care a lot about pushing for greater accessibility in design, and I have a million questions right now as I try to get my bearings in this particular subject. Anything as simple as good keywords to Google to pointing me in the direction of other resources to teach me about this would be immensely appreciated.

Hey all, I working with a college student on a class project to create a web page. One of the things she'd like is a simple in browser screen reader demo. It would be nice if users installed nvda or used voice over, but I know that's a hard sell for people casually browsing. Any ideas or suggestions for something interactive to give sighted users a basic introduction?

hello, if you have a spare minute (really does only take a minute!) could you please take this questionnaire on web accessibility? my boyfriend is about to finish his computer science degree and has made this for his dissertation but we live on a small island and he hasn’t got as many answers as he’d hoped.

for context (you’ll see once you do the questionnaire), we live on the Isle of Man, part of the Channel Islands in the UK and Manx is what we call ourselves and it is also our language.

if you could do this i would really appreciate it and so would he!!

https://forms.gle/uxWSnHt6qtxWjehM8

Hi! I'm doing a study for my AP Research course about the web accessibility of a group of popular fast fashion websites and would really appreciate it if you guys filled out my survey!! The study is only targeted for those who identify themselves with being differently abled (or having a disability). The survey should only take 5-15 minutes and the presentation of my results will be kept anonymous. Also, it is preferable if you could sign your full name for the consent form as I require some type of identification that the participant consents to be in the study. However, no one besides you, me, and my advisor will be seeing the direct responses from the survey. Please let me know if you have any questions. Also, if you could send this to anyone you know with a disability, that would be greatly appreciated!! Thank you so much! 

Link to Survey: https://forms.gle/6raefFzcYjJ19i9F8

Hey all! I think you'll find this website super useful. It lets you check the contrast ratio of text/image and background colors on your website, and make sure it follows WCAG: https://venngage.com/tools/color-contrast-checker

I teach a class in web development. I’m teaching a section on web accessibility. I‘m looking for some tests my students can perform to to test their web sites for accessibility compliance.

I also need an easy way for me to me to evaluate the work.

I found more than a few websites that test but these all require logins, cost, and generally are a barrier for students.

Kinda shocked not finding a single developer community discord server for A11y... is this something others here might be interested in starting?

I'm trying to gain a better understanding of how those who use screen readers would prefer to experience a traditional grid based month calendar. I've tried googling and searching various forums, but haven't found much and what I have found has been mostly focused on date pickers. I'm talking about simply a month calendar that has events that can be clicked on for more information.

I guess the first question and the most naive... do those who are completely dependent on screen readers want to use a grid based calendar, or is that a lot of noise and they'd prefer to bypass such a view and just have a simple list of events happening during the month?

If they do want to use a grid calendar... is there a preference of using tables vs not? My inclination was that tables were not ideal because there's a lot of announcements about columns and what not, on the other hand perhaps the table structure is helpful for AT? I guess I was thinking it would be more helpful to be like:

"Second week of March. March 5th through 11th. Sunday, March 5th. No events. Monday, March 6th. No events. Tuesday, March 7th, 2 events. List with 2 items link, Taco Conference, Tuesday, March 7 2023, 9am to 5pm. Link: Dentist Appointment. Tuesday, March 7 2023, 12pm to 1pm EST. Out of list. Wednesday, March 8th. No events.".... and so on.

Wanted to share this because I think it's super useful for those of us working on web accessibility.

Found this website that allows you to grab your site's link, drop it and show you how it looks for different types of color blindness: https://venngage.com/tools/color-blind-simulator

Hope it's helpful!

The least popular way to add a skip to main content link on a page is to have it showing all the time. Is there a study that shows how many low vision or keyboard users even know about the “skip to main content” link? I feel like it would be the preferred method if people actually knew about it because there are more low vision users and keyboard users than blind users.

Hey all,

I'm a tester that has checked A11Y for Europe, USA, etc. (WCAG, ADA...). Recently It came into my hands a proposal that' included China in it as a major user for the client.

With this, I'm encountering some challenges, so if anyone has already done something like this, I could really use some type of guidance:

• The A11Y requested is for a public site, so from what I read in https://www.w3.org/WAI/policies/china/ I came to the following conclusions&questions:

QUESTIONS

• It seems the law passed in 1990 applies to the public and private sector but is just a recommendation. Am I right?
• From what I checked in W3C WAI https://www.w3.org/WAI/policies/china the recommended technical requirements documents are mostly broken, or I can see only a part of it. However, it seems they stipulate the WCAG 2.0 as standard. Can anyone confirm this, and if so, which standard (A,AA)?
• The last doubt I have is about language, as it uses Chinese characters. If the website is programmed with Aria Live, can I check in English the meaning of the electronic texts and labels and be sure it will be automatically translated to Chinese? Or if there's a way to develop correct labels/texts and automatically translate them to Chinese, even if you test them in English? For now, I've only done a11y testing in languages I use and with no Cyrillic/Chinese characters so not sure how to approach this.

​

Thank you sou much in advance _;)

Hello!

I know there is a built-in error message handling for form fields, with the ability to use customized messages using setCustomValidity, but they cannot be styled and that is almost always a no-no from clients who want custom styled errors instead.

I have no idea how accessible it can be to simply show an error message in an element immediately after the form field.

Is the <output> element an accessible way of providing error messages? MDN says it has the aria-live modifier and it can be tied to a field with the for="" attribute just like a <label>.

<label for="password">Password</label>
<input type="password" name="password" id="password" />
<output for="password"></output>

They all just say their own thing and totally disrespect anything I've written, where's my aria-errormessage?... sometimes it won't even say aria-describedby... orca sometimes will skip entire focused fields, read stuff twice, sometimes all of them, will read text only halfway, but then I use firefox and it all changes, and it's different mistakes this time.

Inspecting elements shows that all the attributes are set correctly.

None of them even respect lang, and yes, I have content in different languages.

Do I need to make my own screen reader in app too?... Does someone know if screen readers such as NVDA which I have no idea how to get working within linux actually respect the aria standard?...

I honestly feel at this point that having an own screen reader within the app will yield much better results.

Is there any way to make <input type="date"> and <input type="time"> behave on touchdevics like they do on desktops and laptops?

In Chrome on Windows and macOS <input type="date"> is a textfield combined with a datepicker. That's great.

On iOS and Android it's only a datepicker though, which does work for blind people in theory, but doesn't necessarily when they're not used to it. A text input like on a desktop or laptop would work better for them.

Would be great if we could finally get rid of hacky Javascript datepickers and start using native inputs elements.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/input/date

For the next month, I'm working with a small group of developers to build a project for our portfolios, and we'd like to make something impactful. We are considering building some sort of chrome extension that could transform pages you view to be more accessible. What sorts of tools would be most helpful? Are there tools that you wish existed, or exist but could use improvement?

TIL that screen-readers don't register text-styling such as <b> and <strong> without changes to their default set up (which I understand people rarely change).

Which gives me a problem. I'm working on a project to accessibly describe some video content, in order of the narrative.

So a sample goes like this:

<h3>The Pub</h3>

<p>The pub has the word HOTEL painted on its corrugated iron dutch-gable roof to be visible from the train ... blah blah</p>

<p>The publican <strong>Charlie</strong> is a white man, mid 30s, with a cleft chin, small eyes and dark blonde hair ... blah blah</p>

So I was using <strong> to call out that Charlie is a significant element -- a character -- who owns and exists in the pub. For a sighted user, that's obviously easy to pick out.

Obviously, if a screen reader is not going to change any emphasis or call out the <strong> I need an alternative.

The only thing I can think of would be to wrap the character description in a <section> with an aria label, but I was wondering if anyone could suggest anything less heavyweight? An <a name>? but I'm unsure how a screen reader would parse it?

Thank you for any guidance.

I have a WordPress site and the accessibility check report says I need to add some attributes like " aria-haspopup" and "aria-expanded ". Do you think it's valid to use JavaScript DOM manipulation to fix the issue?

I am thinking of using Element.setAttribute() method after the DOMContentLoaded event. What do you guys think?

I ran into an odd thing with a web interface. For a text field (standard textbox), as you typed it changed lower-case letters to upper-case. So you don't get what you typed, but an upper-case version of it.

Specifically on each key press while the text field is active the current string in the field is replaced by an upper-case version of it (Javascript .toUpperCase)

This wasn't on a part that I developed, and the field's case shouldn't be mangled thoughtlessly, but ignoring that, assuming that an upper-case version of the input is fine. What would this be like for people using a screen-reader or other software that would assist in reading/viewing the screen (other than something just makes everything bigger).

I'm starting to notice issues like this more and more (not them being more common, but my notice of them). In the long term, I really need to learn to be comfortable with a screen reader so I can check these issues out myself. In this particular case, I'm focused on two things, would someone using a screen reader be able to follow that the text is being changed as it's typed, and would the overall user experience be understandable. i.e., would a screen-reader-user make sense of this, or would it be garbage.

sidenote:

If there is a good subreddit around for questions about making/ensuring things are usable by people with disabilities (blind/visually impaired is specifically useful), I would certainly appreciate a pointer.

Take this CodePen example: https://codepen.io/mjoanisse/live/qBjdZxb

A keyboard user, is alerted with a message when the tab stop lands on the interactive element. For some reason I can't figure out, invoking a READ ALL command (VO+A) from where the cursor is situated (on the alert message), skips OVER the nested anchor element. If I remove the <strong>Warning:</strong> element, VoiceOver picks up the anchor. Alternatively, if I add a second anchor, VoiceOver recognizes it. For some reason, it won't read the first anchor that is sibling to a <strong /> element.

No, adding the role="text" doesn't solve the problem for the reason outline here: https://dequeuniversity.com/rules/axe/4.3/aria-text

Anyone aware of how to circumvent this peculiar issue / potential bug?

Thanks!

I am new to this and I am tasked to look for a vendor to create a webpage that comply with the wcag 2.1 standard

I am trying to look at existing websites that are wcag 2.1 standard, but I actually dont understand how it works for facilitating accessibility

I have heard that images / pdf become accessible to screen readers and I would like to know how this works. Would there be any website, that allows me to experience the effect of wcag ?

Is there any guidance in the WCAG around gifs beyond the ability to stop/hide them if they go beyond 5 seconds?

The reason I ask is that I find it quite difficult when I come across a gif to determine how much attention I should pay to it (based on its length for example), and whether it has already looped or not. The confusion is likely because there is no indicator of progress and probably a source of confusion for most people.

I'm also looking for any tools that can help me automate some sort of progress bar embedded in a gif. Are there any libraries or tools out there for this? Thank you.