Accessibility links and resources

December 14, 2023

As a follow-up to yesterday’s post on my accessibility journey, I thought I would share some links and resources I have collected on the subject of accessibility. This is not an exhaustive list but ones that I found in my Pocket links and links I had shared in my weeknotes.

Two resources that I highly recommend

• Practical Accessibility course by Sara Soueidan – I have heard great things about this course and Sara is a great teacher.
• Accessibility Weekly newsletter – This has been a great source for keeping up with the best articles and news on the subject of accessibility.

WCAG 2.2

• Understanding the new WCAG 2.2 Criteria
• A Roundup Of WCAG 2.2 Explainers (Smashing Magazine)
• What’s new in WCAG 2.2

ALT text and image descriptions

• Writing great alt text: Emotion Matters – Jake Archibald challenges us to consider the emotional impact of images and how to capture that in alt text.
• Text descriptions and emotion-rich images – Article that Jake references in his article.
• Your Image Is Probably Not Decorative (Smashing Magazine)

General Education

• What a Year of Learning and Teaching Accessibility Taught Me (Sara Soueidan)
• Accessibility For Everyone (2019) – a presentation Laura Kalbag gave at the State of the Browser conference. Good resource to think through the low-hanging fruit with accessibility.
• Smashing Magazine’s guide to accessibility – A collection of Smashing Magazine articles on the subject.
• Accessibility chapter of Web Almanac 2022
• UX Principles that include Cognitive Accessibility
• Accessibility Is Hard and Important – A great reminder that accessibility is hard and the encouragement to identify your next step to improving your skills in this area.
• “That’s not accessible!” and other statements about accessibility – Great thoughts on approaching accessibility as a spectrum and not a one-and-done.
• Why dark mode causes more accessibility issues than it solves – Some important things to consider about using dark mode themes and accessibility.
• Accessibility is Everyone’s Job

Understanding how disabled people use the Web/empathy

• How People with Disabilities Use the Web – A guide put together by the W3C.
• 5 most annoying website features I face as a blind person every single day – I think the most important accessibility lessons come from those most affected by the lack of.
• Equivalent Experiences: What are they? (Smashing Magazine) – One of the best articles I have read on accessibility. A lot of stuff that I know but appreciate the different perspectives and some new things to think about to make better experiences for all users. This is a must-read. Go read it now. Seriously.
• Unexpected accessibility tips – This article shares several ideas on how you experience different situations where interfaces are not as accessible because of what you are doing (standing on a train) or what you are wearing (gloves). It also encourages you to navigate a site just with a keyboard.

Developer attitudes

• Front end devs really don’t understand accessibility (Chris Ferdinandi)
• Why Don’t Developers Take Accessibility Seriously?
• Ableist interactions (Hidde de Vries) – A very good article about accessibility and negative attitudes about it.
• Neutrality isn’t an option when it comes to accessibility – I think I agree that this is a subject that you can be neutral about.
• Blaming Screenreaders – A must-read about accessibility. We need to understand our audience and understand this often overlooked audience and remember the burden is on us as developers.

Markup

• HTML Semantics and Accessibility Cheat Sheet – There are some great insights in this cheat sheet.
• Practical accessibility, part 1: Markup semantics & ARIA (Filament Group)
• Practical accessibility, part 2: Name (almost) everything (Filament Group)
• Understanding Logical Focus Order
• Addressing Accessibility Concerns With Using Fluid Type (Smashing Magazine) – I am grateful for this warning about how using clamp() fluid type strategies can cause accessibility problems. I will admit that the math in the article was a bit intimidating. I am glad that there is an online tool that can help me avoid the maths.

Focus Indicators

• A guide to designing accessible, WCAG-conformant focus indicators (Sara Soueidan)

Interactions

• Accessible Interactions – I enjoyed this post by Jeremy Keith where he explores the easy parts of accessibility and the hard parts. He also talked through a specific example. Is always fun to read about someone else’s thought process as they implement solutions.

Accessibility audits and reviews

• Audit Sites for Accessibility (video) – This discussion was incredibly helpful to me in learning about accessibility audits. Little did I know that I would be asked to do audits in the six months after watching this video.

• WCAG-EM Report Tool – Hidde mentioned this great tool in the audit video. You can fill in fields for the report and then save it. I used it to save HTML and CSS and then added my own CSS to customize the report I prepared.
• Accessibility Review of kexp.org – Marcy Sutton does an accessibility review of a local radio station’s site and gives some tips that would apply to many sites.

Browser Tools

• Understand Web Accessibility with Firefox Accessibility Inspector
• Testing Color Contrast and Simulating Color Blindness with the Firefox Accessibility Inspector
• Seven ways to test for accessibility of your website with browser Developer Tools

Miscellaneous

• Defining a strategy for accessibility
• The only accessibility specialist in the room
• No, ‘AI’ Will Not Fix Accessibility

This post is part of my attempt to post something every day for a month. I was inspired by Michelle Barker, who recently participated in National Blog Posting Month.