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Set JAWS free!

JAWS, Job Access With Speech, is the world’s most popular screen reader, developed for computer users whose vision loss prevents them from seeing screen content or navigating with a mouse. Freedom Scientific A tweet from my friend Nicolas Steenhout reminded me of one issue I …

Text-overflow: ellipsis considered harmful

This post is basically a short addendum to my article about text resize and reflow. I stumbled over some instances of text-overflow: ellipsis the other day and it broke resize and/or reflow. The whole reason text-overflow exists is to specify the behavior of text once it flows …

WCAG SC 1.4.4 Resize Text & 1.4.10 Reflow

There seems to be a confusion about the relationship and how to test for the WCAG 2.1 Success Criteria 1.4.4 Resize Text and 1.4.10 Reflow. While these two success criteria seem related, they cover different use cases. 1.4.4 Resize Text This success criterion that was introduced …

I want to ride my bicycle

Last week, I received a big box with something that I hoped to buy for a long time. As you might have guessed from the title of the blog post, it was a bike. Now, I’m not the most active person, especially through the last two-and-a-bit years of pandemic life, so a regular bike …

May 2022 Speaking Gigs

I’ll be holding three talks and workshops remotely in May. Diversity in May (Mangfold i mai) – ARIA Live Regions and User Preferences For NAV, the Norwegian Labour and Welfare Administration, I’ll be holding two sessions for their “Diversity in May” series of events. Workshop: …

Thank you, Knowbility.

After almost, but not quite, six years, I had my final day with Knowbility last week. The time working with them was great. I’m going to miss working with the many great minds over there. Knowbility picked up and supported my W3C/WAI work when EU funding dried up in 2016 with …

There is no character limit for “alt text”

When you search for alternative text length on the internet, there seems to be a pretty common understanding that “some screen readers” truncate alternative text[^ Note that many people use the phrase “alt text”, because the “traditional” way to use alternative text is through …

No Accessibility Without Disabilities

People who are tasked with remediating accessibility often have little experience of how people with disabilities actually use the web. This leads to overcomplicated solutions, as they underestimate the capabilities of disabled people. A few years ago, I talked to a person new …

“Person of the Week”

Thanks to Smashing Magazine for naming me(!) “Person of the Week” during last week. This is what they had to say: Eric Eggert ( @yatil) is a Web Accessibility Expert who tries to make the web a better place for everyone. He’s currently Director of Accessibility Services at …

The Year of Intent

Since hearing Myke Hurley and CGP Gray talk about “yearly themes” on the Cortex podcast, I try to go into every year with a theme that acts as the north star for decisions during that time. As I outlined in my 2021 blog post, it was a stressful year and I never really felt in …

2021

I welcomed 2021 with a blog post, so let’s wave goodbye to it that way, too. To be honest, I don’t have an extensive review in me. This has been an extraordinarily tough and stressful year for me. After COVID had held strongly in the winter of 2020, the spring felt to be more …

WCAG 3 is not ready yet

Table of Contents What’s the issue with being an early adopter? So, what about that “new color contrast algorithm”, then? So, should you use APCA? What is the way forward? What if…? Addendum 2021-12-14 Update 2023-03-28 In the last couple of weeks, more and more people point at …

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