ruby

how does one actually measure a11y? like, some things are obviously bad, but when i'm in doubt i have no actual idea how to investigate it. i have no idea how disabled people interact with technology...

i know there are all these "best practicies" but i have no idea where they come from; how do i simulate a blind/colorblind/bad vision/alternative input methods?

• your browser's devtools: firefox has the Accessibility tab, chrome has the side pane of the Elements tab, the Lighthouse inspector, and some other stuff too (it's kinda all over the place there...). these will give you a breakdown of the accessibility tree by roles, as well as associated properties like names, descriptions, etc - basically the view of your page from the perspective of input and assistive technologies. firefox goes the extra mile with some basic linting checks, a tab order visualization tool, and a vision impairment simulator built in (if anyone knows equivalents for these in chrome, like an extension or something, i'd love to know them).
• the axe suite of tools - there's a bunch of stuff here, like a linter extension for vscode, a browser extension, and integrations with testing tools to check your code for correct semantic structure, colour contrast, accessible labelling, and a bunch more. i've not messed with this super in depth yet, but i know it exists and it's a pretty widely adopted tool so i think it's worth a callout.
• a screen reader: on macos/ios it's VoiceOver, android has TalkBack, windows has Narrator built-in but JAWS and NVDA are also popular options, and on linux i test with Orca. learn to use the screen reader, and try using it to interact with your website as you go. can you navigate where you need to go easily? is the screen reader telling you what you need to know? is it telling you things that aren't important? at the end of the day, these are the tools users will be accessing your website with, and you should make sure your website works with them, just like you would make sure your site works across browsers.
• your keyboard: keyboard use is a pretty important aspect of accessibility, too! try navigating and interacting with your site without touching your mouse. tab around to focus, pgup/pgdn to scroll, enter to interact, space for selecting things like checkboxes. browsers do a pretty good job of making this work by default, but every now and then you might catch something you only have an onmousedown listener on that should probably be an onclick, for example.
• the WAI resources: W3C's Web Accessibility Initiative are the people in change of defining accessibility standards for the web, and they have a whole load of useful resources on their site. give it a flip through, particularly the stuff for developers and designers. the quick reference in my opinion is super useful, with a bunch of "here's how to do xyz in a way that meets accessibility standards".
• i'll also call out APCA, a new method for calculating contrast between two colours that looks like it'll get adopted as part of the upcoming WCAG 3.0 guidelines. in my opinion, this method is much more useful than the current WCAG 2.2 rules, and has less false positives on poor contrast and false negatives on acceptable contrast. it's not standard yet though, and might not ever be (i'll be surprised if it doesn't get into WCAG 3.0 though), so your mileage may vary with this one.

this is by no means exhaustive! accessibility is one of those things that's really hard to measure objectively, but a little more vibes-based, in that it's more about "does this feel easy to use? am i having a hard time using this site?" than hard, technical pass-or-fail requirements (although that's still a factor!). it's hard to get everything right, but hopefully some of these tools can help guide you to a pretty solid place.

Please read this article.

It's not what you're expecting. It's not a post about why alt text is important. It's not a post about how to write it well.

It's a post about access, and how access is seen by the people who feel they're providing access as a service, and whether or not that service is helpful or even welcome.

This post isn't meant to tell you whether you should use alt text. You should. Anything you write is better than having a screen reader say "image". "My cat" is more useful than image. Not leaving the box blank is always the right thing to do.

But I see a lot of discussions about accessibility that don't think about the broader subject, and this piece is vital to me to understanding that, as someone who is largely able bodied (I had only temporary visual impairments, so I've had screen reader experience but only in a temporary and basis), whose only real mental disability is ADHD which is nothing even coming close to something like being blind or deaf when interacting with the world.

I think it's important to get this person's message. For example when I see people fret over how to put alt text on their visual art, I keep thinking about the bit in this article about braille transcribed films, and how little this really means to the author and how little they care or are interested in this sad replacement for the experience of a film.

This isn't about alt text at the end of the day. But if we're going to have a big debate about alt text, like any other accessibility debate, I think the perspective here is so important. It absolutely will change the way you approach all accessibility. And it doesn't mean you will simply think it's no longer important, it absolutely is. But it will reframe how you approach it.

if you have ever cared enough to comment on accessibility read this shit.
seriously.
read it.

a single key on a piano is played, producing a sound. what does that sound mean?

to a musician, it's a middle c note.

to a physicist, it's a collection of compression waves with a fundamental frequency of roughly 261.63Hz.

to a spectator at a concert, it's the beginning of their favourite song.

got nerdsniped yesterday, in the process of trying to determine what the Capital C Correct way to implement the following UI is, in both a semantically correct and accessible way:

Success

yeah i know, bad colour contrast, shhhhh thats not what this chost is about

seems pretty straightforward, right? an icon, and some text next to it. how hard can it be? i mean, i just did it right there. surely it can't be that difficult.

turns out the actual specifications are surprisingly vague on this.