Author: Dennis

Categories
stats webaim

The WebAIM Million—Updated

The WebAIM Million report, an accessibility analysis of the top 1,000,000 home pages, has been recently updated. Here’s a summary of the update from WebAIM. Sadly, per the report data, the state of web access hasn’t improved much, and has actually worsened overall.

The number of errors increased 2.1% between February 2019 and February 2020.

Below are key points, notes, a call to action, and related tweets.

WebAIM web accessibility in mind

Key Data Points

  • Detectable WCAG failure rate rose from 97.8% to 98.1%.
  • The most common errors:
    • Low contrast text
    • Missing alternative text for images
    • Empty links
    • Missing form input labels
    • Empty buttons
    • Missing document language
  • Home pages with ARIA present averaged 60% more errors than those without.
  • 56% of the 3.4 million form inputs identified were unlabeled (either via <label>, aria-label, or aria-labelledby).
  • Only 128,054 (6.8%) of the tables had valid data table markup.
  • Website homepages using Vue.js had a whopping 76.2 errors per page.
  • 10.8% of home pages had a “skip” link present. However, 11.1% of these links were broken.

Notes

  • This study was done using an automated tool which is capable of detecting only a portion of actual accessibility issues/errors. Actual accessibility errors is certainly much higher. (Even after considering that there may be some false positives from automated testing.)
  • When we should be simplifying content, home page complexity increased 10.4% in 12 months, from an average of 782 elements per page to 864.
  • I wrote about the first report and related issues last year — About the HTML Epidemic, WebAIM “Million” Report, and Teach Access (March 2019).

Call for Action

Developers need to do better with accessibility, and using semantic HTML. The poor results of this report are just not acceptable; it’s poor craftsmanship and poor quality of work. Devs can start improving by:

Tweets

https://twitter.com/aardrian/status/1245723560318025728

Categories
roundup

Digital Accessibility Roundup February 2020

So many great articles around digital accessibility lately! Here are some (with author and quote/summary) which I thought were very useful.

  • Link Targets and 3.2.5 by Adrian Roselli @aadrian.
    “Regardless of what accessibility conformance level you target, do not arbitrarily open links in a new window or tab. If you are required to do so anyway, inform users in text.”
  • [ARIA] Roles and relationships by Sarah Higley @codingChaos.
    “even small mistakes in using these roles can take a user on a very bad trip”
  • Squarespace, Wix, & Weebly: Accessibility Review by @TerrillThompson.
    “For accessibility, avoid Weebly. Both Squarespace and Wix are capable of creating accessible sites, but the user has to be looking to do so—it isn’t gonna happen by default.”

  • On custom select dropdowns:
  • Studies/statistics on current state of web accessibility:
    • Higher Ed in 4k Project by PopeTech.
      “…93.331% of pages had detectable WCAG violations. There were a total of 7,464,465 detectable errors found or 23.8 errors per page.”
    • Click-Away Pound Survey (2019) by @CAPsurvey.
      “In 2016, the survey found that more than 4 million people abandoned a retail website because of the barriers they found, taking with them an estimated spend of £11.75 billion. In 2019, that lost business, the ‘Click-Away Pound’, has grown to £17.1 billion.”
  • My Priority of Methods for Labeling a Control by Adrian Roselli @aadrian.
    Adrian explains why explicit HTML label association is best.
  • Operating System and Browser Accessibility Display Modes by Eric Bailey @ericwbailey.
    “Five such modes are Dark Mode, Increased Contrast Mode, Inverted Colors Mode, Reduced Motion Mode, and High Contrast Mode. Following is an explanation of each of these mode, who can benefit from it, how to enable it on your device or browser (if supported), and how to work with it in code.”
  • Checking 3rd Party Vendors’ Product Accessibility by @vavroom via @knowbility.
    • “You may have difficulty finding a fully accessible solution. Do take the time to run some simple tests to get a better feel for the product. The more precise your questions and requirements about accessibility, the more likely you are to be able to determine if a product meets your needs. And the more protected you’ll be should the product fail to meet expectations.”
    • Also: Vendor Responsibilities for Accessibility by Jay Wyant @jay_wyant.
  • Pixels vs. Relative Units in CSS: why it’s still a big deal by Kathleen McMahon @resource11.
    “Remember, users really do change their settings under the hood, and we should be maintaining users’ control over their own browsing experience. If you use relative CSS units for your typography styles, you can maintain the fidelity of your layouts without negatively impacting the needs of your users.”
  • How accessible is the HTML video player? by Scott Vinkle @svinkle.
    “relying on native video players should be used with caution…I found most to have poor keyboard and screen reader support, which may lead to frustrated users”
  • And finally, congrats @WebAIM on your 20-year anniversary! Thank you for your tremendous leadership in web accessibility.
dog herding group of sheep
Sheepdog “rounding up” some sheep.
Categories
expert

Passing of Joseph O’Connor

I’m deeply saddened to hear that Joseph O’Connor, tremendous accessibility advocate, recently died. His passing was announced on his personal website; please read Remembering Joseph O’Connor (1953 – 2020). Joseph was highly loved and respected in the accessibility community and will be sorely missed.

Joseph suffered from chronic illness and experienced serious pain especially over the last years of his life. One-and-a-half years ago, he wrote about a profound conference proposal Accessible Death in which planned his own inclusive funeral (the proposal was not accepted).

Head shot of Joseph and Linda O'Connor
Joseph and his wife. Photo credit: black telephone website

Joseph was a big contributor to the accessibility of WordPress and was a guest on Web Axe Podcast 100: Joe & Joseph on WordPress Accessibility (Sep. 2014). I presented with Joseph on Accessibility of Twitter at CSUN back in 2010 which was a terrific experience.

Below are some touching tweets about his passing. Rest in peace, my friend.

Addendum

Tweets about Joseph O’Connor

https://twitter.com/mak_en/status/1214732865335750656

https://twitter.com/stevefbuell/status/1214940045116919808?s=11

Categories
jobs

Digital Accessibility Jobs, November 2019

Many more tremendous opportunities in the field of digital accessibility.

As always, watch out for more job listings on Twitter via @a11yJobs, @EasyChirp, @LyndonDunbar, and me @WebAxe.

Categories
conference roundup Toronto

Accessibility Toronto Conference 2019 Summary

The third annual Accessibility Toronto Conference was held recently at TELUS in downtown Toronto, Ontario, Canada. On Twitter, the hash tag is #a11yTO and the account is @a11yTO.

Accessibility Toronto Conference logo

And for the first time, both an Accessibility In Real Life conference (#a11yIRL) and a conference dedicated to accessible gaming (#a11yTOGaming). They were run the day before and after the main conference. All events were a big success!

The week even included a few social events in the evening including an entertaining karaoke party hosted by Shopify and a Tweetup hosted by Slack.

A theme which seemed to emerge from the conferences collectively was: Design *with* people with disabilities, not *for* people with disabilities.

large room with many people seating; a few people on stage in front; there is a monitor on right and live captions on left

Other notables from the conference were the adjustable desk on stage and a video puppet which reminded attendees when the sessions are about to start!

See below for a list of available presentation resources (from the a11yTO conference), selected tweets, and a few excellent conference reviews. See you there next year?

Presentation Resources (partial)

Tweets

https://twitter.com/AidanA11y/status/1187433905407889408

https://twitter.com/arigaud_ca/status/1187723968142348289

https://twitter.com/ewaccess/status/1187398456823951361

https://twitter.com/ewaccess/status/1187820847492468742

https://twitter.com/Susan_Till/status/1187814103764656129

Other Reviews