Online Accessibility

International News

Accessible and ‘a pleasure to read’: how Apple’s podcast transcriptions came to be. (Jun, the Guardian)

A Brief Introduction to Keyboard Accessibility (Jun, AFixt)

How People with Disabilities Use the Web updated resource to help “developers, designers, content creators, and others understand the reasons behind creating accessible digital products”. (Jun, W3C Web Accessibility Initiative)

A complete guide for content creators to start making accessible content. (Apr, Pope Tech Blog)

Internet Privacy Is A Disability Rights Issue.

“No disabled person should have to choose between accessing technologies that help them lead fulfilling, self-directed lives and protecting their personal information. And, people with disabilities should be able to benefit from technology without worrying that their health-related data will be used for nefarious or unknown purposes.” (Jan, Tech Policy)

Web Accessibility Cookbook:

“dozens of recipes to help you build common components on the web, such as navigations, forms, filters, tables, and dialogs, in an accessible manner.” (Manuel Matuzović)

Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2:

“The new updates in WCAG 2.2 focus on improving accessibility for users with cognitive, learning or mobility disabilities and low vision users. This is a beneficial update, showing a positive step forward for the web accessibility standards.” (2023, AbilityNet)

ChatGPT is not ready to handle web accessibility remediation (2023, Karl Groves)

Website accessibility of the world's largest brands. 56% of images are not accessible, 64% have links not clearly marked, 25% of forms are missing clear labels. (2023, AudioEye)

A historical review of Web Accessibility using WAVE “Overall, the data shows that efforts are being made in order to make the websites more accessible.” (2023, UC Irvine)

Are you making these five mistakes when writing alt text? (2023, The A11Y Project)

The WebAIM Million: The 2023 report on the accessibility of the top 1,000,000 home pages. (2023, WebAim)

Equally AI Releases ChatGPT-Powered Report on Web Accessibility Websites in the US, Urges Business Leaders to Prioritize Inclusivity. (2023, PR Web)

A guide to writing accessible image captions. (2023, Mashable)

Meet the first-ever accessibility engineer at The Washington Post. (2023, Nieman Lab)

How to write hyperlink text for better web accessibility (2023, Scope)

What's New in WCAG 2.2 Draft (2023, W3C Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI))

New Brutalism and web accessibility: brutalist style and its interactions with accessibility. (2022, UX Collective)

The History of Digital Accessibility (2022, Storyly)

WordPress 6.1 Accessibility Improvements. (2022, Make Wordpress Core)

Verifying the Disability Equality Index by measuring how their website conforms with web-access standards: “the DEI score is not a good predictor of the accessibility score.” (2022, jpdev.pro)

Yes, accessibility is also a backend concern. “Backend developers wield a tremendous amount of power, as they help shape the underlying structure of what is and is not possible when creating a digital experience.” (2022, Eric W Bailey)

Web3 must learn from the past: People with disabilities are the largest untapped demographic (2022, Venture Beat)

What's Happening with Digital Accessibility in 2022 (2022, UsableNet)

Q&A: Patrick Garvin The creator of two web accessibility bots talks alt text and accountability. “If accessibility is only pitched as something that’s related to code or only related to computers, it’s going to be real easy for people in newsrooms to distance themselves from that.” (2022, Objective Journalism)

A how-to on using Firefox for accessibility testing “Firefox has become one of the best tools for accessibility audits.” (2022, The A11Y Project)

Digital Accessibility: The Next Frontier of Disability Rights Includes a discussion on justifying digital accessibility because of legal compliance or as an opportunity for growth, preferring the latter, quoting this reasoning: “[Focusing on lawsuits] capitalizes on this fear that disabled people are out there to sue you and make your life difficult …. It furthers this really horrible view of disabled people that we’re literally out there to get money and that we just use our disabilities for that.” (2022, Women Enabled International)

Exploration of alt-text including detailed advice (2022, Accessible Social)

5 Ways Delivery Apps Don't Deliver On Accessibility (2022, UsableNet)

An accessibility review of public and private sector websites shows private sector websites significantly worse. Even big companies that have made commitments on disability inclusion through membership of Valuable 500 still only offer a median accessibility score of 52.6, a fraction lower than the median score of Fortune 500 websites. (2022, Silktide)

Why Are iFrame Titles Important for Accessibility? (2022, Bureau of Internet Accessibility)

Takeaways from The Internet is Unusable: The Disabled View (2022, Lireo Designs)

Does Your Website Have Have Any of These 10 Most-Cited Accessibility Issues? (2022, Equal Entry)

WordPress 6.0 Features Numerous Accessibility Improvements (2022)

Zoom Continues to Miss the Boat on True Accessibility. (2022, Living with Hearing Loss)

New Department of Justice ADA Web Accessibility Statement reiterating that accessibility online is covered by disability discrimination. (2022, BOIA)

How creating an accessible product helped Stark build an inclusive team "You can’t build an accessible product without breaking down internal silos first" (2022, The Drum)

The Hidden Image Descriptions Making the Internet Accessible a feature on alternative text for images (2022, NYT)

Email Accessibility 4 Best Practices for Marketers (2022, BOIA)

A chrome plug-in Wordle for Screen Readers. Great game, and good to see some accessibility retrofitted: see also a site that gives you descriptive text to allow sharing the results in an accessible way. Another disappointing example of how things can go viral without accessibility being baked in. (2022)

6 Tips to make your Tweets more accessible and inclusive (2022, Twitter)

Disabled And Here "a disability-led effort to provide free and inclusive images from our own perspective" (2022, Affect the Verb)

The case for describing race in alternative text attributes (2022, Tolu Adegbite)

Rich Screen Reader Experiences for Accessible Data Visualization

“Although our design dimensions highlight a diverse landscape of screen reader experiences for data visualizations, our study participants attested to the value of following existing best practices. Namely, alt text and data tables provide a good baseline for making visualizations accessible. Thus, visualization authors should consider adopting our design dimensions to enable more granular information access patterns only after these initial pieces are in place.” (2022, MIT Visualization Group)

Microsoft Edge site ALT text adds more “making the web a more inclusive and accessible place, starting with the blind and low vision community.” (2022, Microsoft)

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Bangladesh

Web Accessibility is now a reality in Bangladesh, not a dream anymore (a bold description of the important initiatives taken.) (2021, Digital Journal)

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China

How Visually Impaired Engineers Are Guiding China’s Accessibility Efforts “A team of partially sighted software programmers in Shenzhen is improving information accessibility by helping developers eliminate the many obstacles facing disabled users.” (Feb, Sixth Tone)

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India

Why does India fail to address digital accessibility gaps? “There has been no progress in the number of accessible central government websites, which remains at 95 since 2020.” (Sep, Newslaundry)

Court of Chief Commissioner for Persons with Disabilities orders a online healthcare service provider to make its application and website accessible. (2022, The Hindu)

Usability and accessibility-based quality evaluation of Indian airline websites. (2022, Universal Access in the Information Society)

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Europe

Access Denied: The (in)accessibility of European Political Party websites (Apr, EDF)

Review of the Web Accessibility Directive (2022, EC)

The Digital Services Act must ensure accessible digital services for persons with disabilities (2022, Brussels Morning)

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France

Accessibility Advocates Sued by French Overlay Company discussion of advocates who lost a lawsuit for tweets critiquing the company. (Jan, Equal Entry)

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Ireland

Major Irish websites inaccessible “Three-quarters of the country’s top 100 websites are technically inaccessible to 600,000 people with disabilities, according to new research from the National Council for the Blind of Ireland (NCBI).” (2023, Irish Independent)

Can we use AI to tackle internet accessibility? “We visited Vision Ireland and its spin-out IA Labs, which is looking at AI as a way to make the internet more accessible for people with visual impairments.” (2023, Silicon Republic)

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Ukraine

One in five Ukrainian state websites now sufficiently accessible to people with disabilities. “In 2023, 22% of the government websites analysed were found to be sufficiently and highly accessible. Compared to 2021, this was a rise of 9%.” (Feb, UNDP)

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United Kingdom

Accessibility as a cyber security priority Want security that works better for people? Make it accessible. (2023, NCSC)

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Canada

The internet doesn't have to be impossible to navigate for Canadians with disabilities. (2022, National Post)

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United States

Dungeons & Dragons taught me how to write alt text. (Jul, Eric Bailey)

Google Accused of Collecting California Disabled Drivers’ Data: “Google LLC was hit with a proposed class action alleging the tech giant collected and monetized personal information about users’ disabilities via the California Department of Motor Vehicles website.” (May, Bloomberg Law)

How Level Access Acquiring UserWay Transforms The Web Accessibility Market Tim Springer, CEO of Level Access explains why they acquired a firm specialising in web accessibility overlays, a controversial way to provide online accessibility:

“When it comes to overlays, within disability and accessibility, there’s always been a very vocal minority that says, ‘Look, these things are bad.’ They want to view the world as black and white but the reality is that the world is a bunch of shades of grey and there is an appropriate place for artificial intelligence and automation in digital accessibility.” (Apr, Forbes)

An Editor Who Makes Times Visuals Accessible to All “Jaime Tanner, The New York Times’s first accessibility visuals editor, wants to remove barriers to make sure readers with disabilities can engage with Times visual journalism.” (Mar, New York Times)

Blind Leader Wins $2 Million Settlement Over Inaccessible California Parks Website. (2023, Tre Legal)

OMB Releases Digital Accessibility Guidance to Ensure All Americans Have Ability to Access Critical Government Resources. (2023, The White House)

What Are the Top Barriers to Digital Inclusion in 2023? “79% of website users and 78% of app users said they feel frustrated because they don’t have as much independence as a sighted person when completing digital tasks.” (2023, American Foundation for the Blind)

How Accessible are Dating Apps? “these services offer little to no recourse for individuals who may have visual impairments.” (2022, Accessibility.com)

For people with disabilities, AI can only go so far to make the web more accessible (2022, Protocol)

LGBTQ+ artists and those with disabilities see Etsy as a lifeline “Many sellers who live at the intersection of multiple marginalized identities were already struggling before the e-commerce site’s latest fee increase.” (2022, 19th News)

How to Create Accessible & Inclusive Digital Platforms for Those With Mental Health Disabilities (2022)

App & Web Accessibility Lawsuits Break Records (2021, UsableNet)

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Australia

A new playground: the digital lives of young people with disability. (2023, Analysis & Policy Observatory)

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Brazil

The Brazilians advocating for digital accessibility. (2022, Fair Planet)

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