a11y (digital accessibility)

This is a new webpage by Harvard University highlighting strategies for creating accessible charts and graphs.

This seems like an interesting math accessibility tool

Mariella is a Stanford student and founder of SignUp, which provides overlay sign language interpretation for Netflix and Disney Plus shows. The interpretation is available in different sign languages like ASL, British, and Indian. This can be very helpful for younger children who can't read captions yet but know how to read sign language.

This is the latest version of WebAIM's screen reader survey. NVDA and JAWS are almost tied for market share. NVDA is the most popular screen reader by a slight margin. CAPTCHAs are the most problematic accessibility barrier people who use screen reading software are encountering.

I hope more states follow Massachusetts's lead and create committees or boards to inform government officials about digital accessibility issues.

This article highlights how to test that your webpage is compatible with speech recognition software.

People who are blind or have low vision use screen reading software as an interface to access digital content and browse the web. This is a good introductory demo of how screen reading software works and why digital accessibility is important.

This guide can be helpful when considering how to stylize text in an accessible way.

Deque Systems is suing BrowserStack for creating a replica of axe DevTools and profiting off their intellectual property.

This three-part series covers how to use Axe tools and other automated testing tools to check the accessibility of a website.

Places of public accommodation like restaurants should be focusing on making their place of business accessible for people with disabilities. This should include ensuring people using wheelchairs can access the space and adding physical accessibility information to their website. Unfortunately, most restaurants are not doing that.

AI products currently do not use a defined enough LLM that focuses on accessibility. This leads to products like Copilot generating inaccessible code for simple tasks. The more AI becomes relied upon and prevalent the more inaccessible code will be pushed out. This may lead to the web becoming more inaccessible.

This article provides foundational tips for writing accessible web content.

This article explains why form fields should not be disabled.

This commercial highlights how people who are blind or have low vision can benefit from the Google Pixel's accessibility features.

Calle stars in the Netflix series All The Light We Cannot See, which is about a blind girl living in Nazi occupied France. Calle is a blind actress and shares her experiences using a guide dog and assistive technology in this article.

In this blog post, Léonie Watson of Tetralogical analyzes the output of three generative AI systems: Google Gemini, ChatGPT, and Fix My Code from Userway.

I haven't used this software but I was looking for software that could generate foreign language captions and I stumbled upon this application. The amount of languages supported is very impressive. Foreign language captions can cost over $10 a minute in some cases. This application greatly reduces the cost and provides an interface to quickly edit and adjust the timing of the captions. This is something more popular software like Otter.ai lacks and Otter only supports English. It might be worth exploring if you're looking to generate and edit foreign captions on the cheap.

This webinar highlights the different issues accessible overlays present and why they cannot make a site WCAG compliant. A lot of WCAG errors are too advanced to be fixed by AI and an overlay can create more problems. The best way to remediate a website is not to add an overly but to make the code of the website accessible.

Remember to add language in the contract around digital accessibility. It can be requiring a website to meet WCAG 2.x AA standards. Bashin reached a settlement in the case and the developer of the inaccessible website had to pay out. The False Claims Act can protect government agencies if digital accessibility language is included in the contract.

SiriusXM, Pandora, and Stitcher apps do not provide transcripts for the majority of their content. They are being sued by the National Association of the Deaf and the case is rumored to be close to a settlement. Hopefully, they will make transcripts more widely available for their content. I wonder if this influenced Apple to add the transcript option to their podcast app.

Sara Soueidan is making her course section on ARIA Live Regions publicly available. It breaks down how to use ARIA to create accessible notifications.

It is important for web designers to consider people using assistive technology in the design process and how the design can be implemented using accessible coding strategies.