I write about... Accessibility

accessibility wordpress

A Very Informal Look at Gutenberg Accessibility

16 October 2018

We have been working all year to replatform our websites at work from Drupal to WordPress. We decided to go with WordPress for many reasons, one of the biggest being its admin UI. The WordPress edit screen, especially when compared to the Drupal edit screen, has historically been intuitive and preferred by content editors. In fact, many of my clients in the past have asked to switch their websites from Drupal (or similarly complex systems) to WordPress because of WordPress’s UI advantages.

accessibility development

The Accessibility of ::before and ::after

19 December 2017

I was recently reading a tutorial on how to use CSS counters. They look great! CSS counters are a new feature of CSS that allow us as developers to enumerate elements in the DOM and then do something with that information. There are plenty of practical uses for this - from numbering highlighted blocks in the text to creating complex nested ordered list bullets. (I mean, we’ve all read government documents that include bullet point 13.2.4.1. Right?)

accessibility

Screen Reader Survey Results

02 October 2017

I launched a survey to help me answer some lingering questions I have had about what tools screen reader users user to navigate websites. Specifically, I wanted to learn about how users interact with links on a site.

accessibility

Yes, Virginia. Unique link text really is important.

09 August 2017

One of my biggest pet peeves these days stems around blog or news sites. Your typical blog front page will include a bunch of articles. Each article has a title, a date, maybe an image, and a small bit of “teaser” text from the article itself. The goal is to get the reader to choose a specific article and click to read the entire article. To make that goal abundantly clear, each article on this front page includes a link or a button that usually says “Read More” (or something similar).

development accessibility

I'm lost!: A brief introduction to web landmarks

20 July 2017

Let’s pretend for a minute that you are a new visitor to Washington DC. You look around and see a lot of streets, buildings, and other structures. You need to get from one point in the city to another. You ask me, a local, for directions. I could give you directions like this:

development accessibility

Bold and strong are not the same thing

10 July 2017

Believe it or not, the <b>, <i>, <strong>, and <em> tags have all been a part of the HTML spec since nearly the beginning. All four of these tags were introduced in HTML 2. However, for a very long time, the community was focused on the <b> and <i> tags only. It is only recently that the <strong> and <em> tags have become “popular”.

development accessibility

Accessibility testing: Screen reader edition

16 September 2016

Accessibility testing on our websites is a large, large topic. I am writing about testing with screen readers here, but please keep in mind that accessibility testing != screen reader testing alone. There is a already great article from Viget about web accessibility testing in general – “How to do Web Accessibility QA“. (Be sure to read both parts.)

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