Domino’s asks the Supreme Court to shut down a lawsuit requiring its website be accessible to blind people by Nick Statt
Domino’s is arguing the requirements would be inconsistent and costly

One more time for the folks in the back. Accessibility guidelines and a metric ton of supporting documents with examples along with easily findable mailing lists with every accessibility practitioner on the planet providing help and advice on accessibility for free every single day have been around now for twenty something years. There’s also Twitter, where those same practitioners have been providing free help for something like ten years every day. This isn’t hard. And a multi-million-dollar company to complain about paying $38,000 to fix their website so that it’s accessible to everyone is crap. Dominos wouldn’t be charged $38,000 to fix things if they had, wait for it, built accessibility in from the ground up. Stuff like this is why people with disabilities are practically in “sue them all and let God sort it out” mode. We shouldn’t have to keep asking politely that large corporations not violate our civil rights. “Please Sir, may I use your site?” I’m not sure if this will make it to the Supreme Court, it can decline to hear this case. I’m not even sure if the court ruling in favor of the plaintiff in this case is likely. But if it has to come to this, then so be it.

Link + Disclosure Widget Navigation by Adrian Roselli (Adrian Roselli)
Early in 2017 I filed an issue against WAI-ARIA Authoring Practices (APG) requesting a change to the menu navigation pattern. Despite a great deal of feedback in agreement, it languished.

I’m looking forward to taking this pattern as well as the linked ones for a spin. I’m hoping for an opportunity to find at least one of these in use in the wild, preferably coupled with research with other people with disabilities. Barring that, it’ll be fascinating to find out which one I like better.

I’m pleasantly surprised to find that Vimeo now has a much more accessible player. I plan to check out #PostPublish after I’m done with my next meeting. I will announce if it’s captioned. If you’re not already a PostStatus member you should be. Best WordPress newsletter around.

Friendly public service announcement to all corporations: Sponsorship of the #NFB19 convention is not a shortcut to the accessibility of your websites or apps. That sponsorship money would be much better spent on doing the actual work of making your websites and apps accessible to everyone.

Facebook's Image Outage Reminds Us How Bad Social Media Accessibility Really Is by Kalev Leetaru
Facebook’s brief image outage earlier this week exposed the general public to just how bad accessibility really is in our modern visual-first social Web. While governments and the technology community are investing heavily in AI bias, they care little about accessibility bias.

I don’t use Facebook very much these days, so I heard about the media outage from the outside. And yes, while there have been improvements, and while I’m not placing blame on Facebook’s accessibility team, the accessibility isn’t great even when the AI so-called alt text functionality is working. The best alt text is text which exposes the context of the image being described, and this is down to content creators. This incident is a prime example of why accessibility advocates and consumer organizations should not be using Facebook as their primary distribution platform. If you must use something like Facebook, then you have a responsibility to make the content you host there as accessible as you can by learning how to add alternative text to your images and, (if you’re using Facebook Live), to transcribe that content and host those transcriptions somewhere else until you can make arrangements to use either a different third-party platform or your own platform, otherwise known as your own website.

A post from Greg McVerry by Greg McVerryGreg McVerry (quickthoughts.jgregorymcverry.com)
@cswordpress Wow, thanks for pointing this out! Was commenting at #IndieWeb organizing meeting that we have a strong #a11y presence, especially among people who use screen readers. Would love to learn more about your voice and journey. Maybe make a section here: https://indieweb.org/accessibility?

I agree that there is a strong accessibility presence within the Indieweb community. The focus on semantic HTML is the catalyst for this in my opinion. The backbone of accessibility is semantic HTML, which at its heart means using HTML elements as they were intended to be used. Thanks for making me aware of the accessibility page on the Indieweb wiki. Adding some information there could be useful to others. I’m getting back into the swing of writing things on my own sites again, and I still have several Indieweb tutorials to finish. Tiny steps.

Inaccessibility of CAPTCHA
Various approaches have been employed over many years to distinguish human users of web sites from robots. The traditional CAPTCHA approach asking users to identify obscured text in an image remains common, but other approaches have emerged. All interactive approaches require users to perform a task believed to be relatively easy for humans but difficult for robots. Unfortunately the very nature of the interactive task inherently excludes many people with disabilities, resulting in a denial of service to these users. Research findings also indicate that many popular CAPTCHA techniques are no longer particularly effective or secure, further complicating the challenge of providing services secured from robotic intrusion yet accessible to people with disabilities. This document examines a number of approaches that allow systems to test for human users and the extent to which these approaches adequately accommodate people with disabilities, including recent noninteractive and tokenized approaches.

How accessibility trees inform assistive tech by Hidde de Vries
The web was designed with built-in features to make accessibility possible; these have been part of the platform pretty much from the beginning. In recent times, inspectable accessibility trees have made it easier to see how things work in practice. In this post we’ll look at how “good” client-side code (HTML, CSS and JavaScript) improves the experience of users of assistive technologies, and how we can use accessibility trees to help verify our work on the user experience.

Understanding SC 3.2.1 on Focus by Raghavendra Satish Peri
3.2.1 On Focus: When any component receives focus, it does not initiate a change of context. (Level A) The intent of this success criterion is to make sure that any unwanted actions are not initiated when focus moves on to an element. For example during tab navigation or shift tab navigation if user focus moves on to a link & a modal is triggered this fails this check point. Here user did not initiate this action; it was initiated when user focus moved on to a particular element.

Inclusive Content Strategy: How to Ensure Your Content is Accessible to Everyone by Deborah Edwards-Onoro
At the February 2019 Accessibility Talks online meetup, AmyJune Hineline, Drupal and WordPress Community Ambassador at Kanopi Studios, spoke about inclusive content strategy, what it means, and how to craft content that is accessible to everyone.

The Anatomy of Accessible Forms: The Problem with Placeholders by Deque Systems
Instructions help users to submit forms successfully. However, if the instructions are provided with a placeholder attribute, then the user might not be able to use that instruction effectively.

Yet another example of the need for HTML elements and attributes to be used as intended by the specification.

I’m not one to throw around the “not-a-real-accessibility-advocate” label, but if someone exhibits a pattern of excuse-making for inaccessibility on behalf of themselves or others or both, they need to hand in their A card. Same if that extends to encouraging fellow people with disabilities to accept excuse-making for inaccessibility. If you do all three then you probably need to be taken to the proverbial woodshed because excuse-making for inaccessibility is never, ever acceptable. Either you believe it’s OK to discriminate or you don’t. It’s that simple. Signed: Someone who was once rightfully taken to the woodshed.

The difference between keyboard and screen reader navigation by léonie Watson
People often include screen reader users in the much larger group of keyboard-only users. Whilst this is correct (most screen reader users don’t use a mouse), it also creates a false impression of the way screen reader users navigate content.

This is a really good primer for anyone building things for the web as well as screen reader users on the differences between screen reader and keyboard navigation. I’ve seen lots of situations where the two are conflated, by both developers and screen reader users.

Also, I really like the footer text on léonie’s site.

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I still think it’s pretty messed up that, for the purpose of getting the topic of equal access for all on the web some play, we have to refer to the benefits for search engine optimization, (most of which are myths), because that’s the only way most people are going to pay attention. It’s either that, or try scaring people by reminding that eventually, they won’t be fully abled. I get it, I’m not going to stop doing it, but it’s still one of the less-desirable, less-lovable parts of accessibility for me.