Blog

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

In the last couple of weeks, more and more people point at the WCAG 3.0 Working Draft and recommend the adoption of aspects from it that suit their needs, despite the draft clearly stating (emphasis theirs): These are  early drafts of guidelines included to serve as initial …

Ask Me Anything Webinar on November 30, 2021

I’ll be joining my Knowbility colleague (“Knowlleague”?) Anthony Vasquez in an evening of questions and answers about web accessibility. Date: November 30, 2021 Time: 8–9pm CEST (Berlin)/1–2pm Central (Austin) Register for the webinar! It’s free! Please send questions in via …

Fix web accessibility systematically

Web accessibility is incredibly important. The web is the prime medium for information, education, entertainment, and social interaction. And it still is incredibly inaccessible to many people. According to WebAIM’s assessment of one million home pages, 97.4% of them had easily …
Links vs. Buttons as text where Links is underlined and buttons is in a rounded rectangle. Underneath is a pill shaped “Read the article” link with an arrow.

Buttons vs. Links

Should some links look like buttons, or should some buttons look like links? Twitter was all up in arms about this issue this week. Let’s take a look to see what these two UI elements are and what they do, and then, how they can look. What are links? Links are interactive …

Media that helped me through 2020

We all needed distraction in 2020. Here are some of my highlights, so maybe you find something to enjoy from the list. Podcasts Unfortunately no podcasts listed have transcripts. The inaccessibility of podcasts is a really big problem. Tech Relay FM is a podcast network …

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