Sometimes you run into a main landmark where you don’t expect one. Like Main Street USA in Hong Kong Disney. So you grab a snack in a diner that serves no hot dogs. You can buy little American flags in the heart of Hong Kong and clothes telling Hong Kong…| Adrian Roselli
In my post Brief Note on Figure and Figcaption Support I demonstrate how, when encountering a figure with a screen reader, you won’t hear everything announced at once: No screen reader combo treats the caption as the accessible name nor accessible description, not even for an image that lacks one.…| Adrian Roselli
TL;DR: Unless you have user testing results saying otherwise, maybe put a check-all checkbox outside the table. The rest of this post is an awkward mash-up of my posts Don’t Turn a Table into an ARIA Grid Just for a Clickable Row and Check-All / Expand-All Controls with a little…| Adrian Roselli
TL;DR: blanket statements about where to put focus when opening a modal dialog are wrong, including this one. This post is meant to help you, an intelligent and thoughtful and empathetic reader, figure out where you should set focus. The scenarios are non-exhaustive. Messages I’m artificially breaking these into three…| Adrian Roselli
Google has an extensive history of releasing products and tools that fail basic accessibility. This is not a function of individuals — Google has some very talented and capable accessibility practitioners. Instead, this is an organizational failure. Failure to require accessibility in its products or services. Failure to support teams…| Adrian Roselli
Automated accessibility testing tools are rightly wary of giving false positives. You don’t want to flag something as an error in a test only to have the team rebuild an entire thing for no reason (never mind the risk of introducing errors). We know automated accessibility testing tools can really…| Adrian Roselli
Since the early days of the web, when images could be floated and text would wrap around them, designers have wanted to bring drop caps onto the web. Then we learned how terrible a pattern like atthew is for users, and CSS introduced :first-letter, letting us believe all…| Adrian Roselli
TL;DR: Probably don’t use disclosure widgets in fieldsets. If you do it anyway, don’t put the trigger in the . Context With / , recent support for the popover attribute, and the never-ending belief that a “clean” page means hiding content, there is a resurgence in stuffing useful content…| Adrian Roselli
I am not going to dive into the details of and . Go read Scott’s 2019 post How do you figure? for an overview. That said, since Scott’s post there has been movement on the AAPI mapping (partly by Scott). Specifically, the element should not provide the accName…| Adrian Roselli
In 2017 I wrote Tweaking Text Level Styles (terrible name in retrospect) and I made regular updates over the years. Stop reading it. Remove it from your bookmarks. Unlink it from your posts. Print it onto paper and then burn it. Demo Wrap-up The conclusions and…| Adrian Roselli
This article was originally posted on evolt.org, an online resource for web developers, maintained by web developers. I have granted evolt.org the right to use this article on their web site, and they are the only entity with the right to reproduce it. Instead of going through the usefulness of…| Adrian Roselli
It’s 2022 and people are still afraid to use and . I understand the layout challenges can be frustrating, but swapping to an ARIA group role will result in a more inaccessible experience. A Solution Try this: ChooseChoose […] legend:not(:focus):not(:active) { position: absolute; overflow: hidden;…| Adrian Roselli
TL;DR: This post does not assert the correct way to code blockquotes, it will only demonstrate how screen readers announce some existing patterns. Test Details The first four examples are lifted from WHATWG HTML’s entry. The next three are from W3C HTML’s 2019 guidance (the W3C HTML spec…| Adrian Roselli
The required set of radio buttons. The white whale to many a developer who is trying their darnedest to ensure they are conveyed accessibly while not also making it sound like every individual radio button must be toggled. 1961 Cadillac Wonderbar dashboard radio by Nicholas Lucien (cropped). CC BY 2.0.…| Adrian Roselli
The online holiday shopping coupled with my need to make a new invoice template got me looking at a common table structure that is harder to expose to screen readers than it seems at first glance. One I first coded in, checks watch, 1997 when I was an ecommerce developer…| Adrian Roselli
Others in this sorta-series: Under-Engineered Custom Radio Buttons and Checkboxen Under-Engineered Toggles Under-Engineered Toggles Too Under-Engineered Text Boxen Under-Engineered Select Menus A common interface pattern allows users to choose one item from a pre-defined set of choices, while still allowing them to add a custom selection if nothing else fits.…| Adrian Roselli
Whether you call them sentence forms, narrative forms, fill-in-the-blank forms, or Mad Libs forms, you are probably describing a form where the fields are interspersed within words in a sentence. Unlike more traditional forms, laid out with simple pairings of labels and fields, these forms are meant to be read…| Adrian Roselli
Others in this sorta-series: Under-Engineered Custom Radio Buttons and Checkboxen Under-Engineered Toggles Under-Engineered Toggles Too Under-Engineered Text Boxen I am still confounded how many developers and designers see a| Adrian Roselli
At the site Rebuilding the Web there is plenty of content questioning the current process and chaos around HTML5 and related specs. A piece that drew my attention echoes the dust-ups I have had over HTML5 (and XHTML2) and whether it’s a good idea to push it so hard when…| Adrian Roselli
Many of us have been following the ongoing progress of HTML5 for some time now, alternately curious and confused by the nascent specification. Comics like the one above (from the CSSquirrel site) demonstrate the frustration many web professionals are feeling with the mixed messages they think they see from the…| Adrian Roselli
This article was originally posted on evolt.org, an online resource for web developers, maintained by web developers. I have granted evolt.org the right to use this article on their web site, and they are the only entity with the right to reproduce it. WebAIM is a non-profit organization within the…| Adrian Roselli
Microsoft revealed some first details of Internet Explorer 9 at the Microsoft Professional Developer’s Conference, as reported by Mashable today. Only in development for three weeks, there’s still quite a lot of time before it gets to market. According to Mashable, Microsoft did have the following to say:On HTML 5:…| Adrian Roselli
TL;DR: Description list support continues to be generally good (with VoiceOver still the outlier), even if you may not like how it is supported. For background, the has existed since HTML+, or 1993, when it was called definition list. In December 2022 I wrote Brief Note on Description List…| Adrian Roselli
I have written a bunch about responsive tables. Maybe too much. I keep trying to give developers the information they need to make informed decisions — ARIA attributes, screen reader & browser pairing results, bugs, and so on. I have spread things out over years of posts. I have filed…| Adrian Roselli
It’s been three months since evolt.org rolled out its new design. People have been asking what we did, why we did it, and how we did it. I’ll try to address these questions in the context of the HTML, the CSS, and the overall site design. (Nobody seems to care…| Adrian Roselli
This post is about exposing field errors programmatically. I have already shared some opinions (such as a caution about displaying messages below fields or avoiding default browser field validation), but this post dives into using ARIA to convey them to screen reader users. With fields that produce error messages on…| Adrian Roselli
Using ARIA instead of HTML is generally fine for content, layout, structure, and other static bits of a page. A is the same as as far users and accessibility APIs are concerned. It is unlikely a user will ever notice the difference unless you use both…| Adrian Roselli
Does what it says on the tin. Uses and with a bit of ARIA to create an accordion that works without JavaScript while working better with JavaScript. Mostly. See the Pen Progressively Enhanced HTML Accordion by Adrian Roselli (@aardrian) on CodePen. Visit the standalone version for testing or…| Adrian Roselli
When I wrote Under-Engineered Text Boxen in 2019 I mentioned (WHATWG, MDN) but did not dwell on it. Partly because support was poor at the time. Once Can I Use’s entry listed Firefox on Android supporting it in version 110, I got excited and started testing to write…| Adrian Roselli
All Posts Tagged: html| adrianroselli.com
3 January 2025: This post is out of date. Read my post Updated Brief Note on Description List Support for the most recent results of testing. TL;DR: Description list support is generally good (with Safari being the outlier), even if you may not like how it is supported. This post…| Adrian Roselli
This article was originally posted on evolt.org, an online resource for web developers, maintained by web developers. I have granted evolt.org the right to use this article on their web site, and they are the only entity with the right to reproduce it. By now everyone has had the opportunity…| Adrian Roselli
Alex Russell wrote a four-part series a couple weeks ago arguing that modern JavaScript-first framework-focused front-end development is costing the industry and users. Part of his conclusion for organizations: Never, ever hire for JavaScript framework skills. Instead, interview and hire only for fundamentals like web standards, accessibility, modern CSS, semantic…| Adrian Roselli
I am mis-using closed captions for a gag. The following video has an audio track and four sets of captions (for now?). Each set of captions is in English. Only one set of captions represents the spoken dialog, the other two represent dialog not in the video. The tracks are…| Adrian Roselli
Remy Sharp asked on the Mastodon about pagination as he found it in the W3C Design System:| Adrian Roselli
I had some issues using the Disability:IN 2024 Conference Agenda so I made a bookmarklet: 🔗 Fix Disability:IN Agenda You may have seen this originally posted as a CodePen, but I opted to move it here since I can embed videos showing a before-and-after experience. Fixes Removes empty trigger link…| Adrian Roselli
If you want something done right, post it wrong. In the long history of the innertubes, if you ask for help with code you typically won’t get much of a response. But if you post code and assert it is ideal and perfect and an immutable reflection of your pristine…| Adrian Roselli
TL;DR: Be careful when using the word menu. Be certain you have chosen the term that accurately describes the control you want. If this post looks familiar to you, that is because it is essentially a redress of my 2020 post Stop Using ‘Drop-down’. It is not as divergent as…| Adrian Roselli
TL;DR: Keep your image alternative text brief, devoid of special characters, empty of URLs, and ideally in one language. Here We Go Sometimes you can have too much alternative text, particularly for an . I don’t mean there is a limit to what is allowed, I mean there is a…| Adrian Roselli
It was late 2020 when I last tested how browsers use CSS display properties to break the semantics of elements. I had been waiting for Safari to fix how it handles display: contents for four years now, and was excited when the announcement came in June. Then I started testing…| Adrian Roselli
This is not a comparison between popovers and dialogs, nor is it a discussion of support. This is me trying to get ahead of a potential issue for users when developers mix and match the patterns. I will let this 32 second video explain: Sorry, your browser doesn’t support embedded…| Adrian Roselli
Photo by studio tdes. Used under CC BY 2.0 Deed. Image cropped and contrast enhanced. A few days ago Benjy Stanton asked about breaking long words in tables. I offered a suggestion, which may or may not have worked. I never asked. My failure to follow up aside, it reminded…| Adrian Roselli
There are plenty of use cases for embedding third-party content on a site, as well as local content that may not be in HTML. Perhaps you gave a talk and want to share your slides. Sometimes you want to reference a video that exists only on YouTube. Maybe you have…| Adrian Roselli
TL;DR: Stop using the word pop-up. Instead choose a term that accurately describes the control you want. I encourage you to read my post Stop Using ‘Drop-down’, which provides the set-up for this post. Along with another term I would prefer everyone stopped using. As you embark on a design,…| Adrian Roselli
Others in this sorta-series: Under-Engineered Custom Radio Buttons and Checkboxen Under-Engineered Toggles Under-Engineered Toggles Too This is the latest, and not last, in my informal series of posts on under-engineered controls. Generally I am looking at the minimum amount of CSS necessary to style native HTML controls while also retaining…| Adrian Roselli
This post supplements Browser Video Players Review. There I wade into the de facto accessibility of the element based on the default video players provided by browsers. The results of my testing here update the tables in that post. One of the primary challenges of using the browsers’ default…| Adrian Roselli
Before you get too far into this post, maybe read Browser Video Players Review. There I wade into the accessibility of the element based on the video players browsers provide. Then maybe read Scott Jehl’s How to Use Responsive HTML Video (…and Audio!). I am leaning on support in…| Adrian Roselli
Table of Contents Example The HTML Live Region Button Decoration Accessible Name The Styles Hide the Live Region Color and Contrast Active Animations Text Resize and Reflow Windows High Contrast Mode The Script The Click Event Manipulate Outcomes Screen Reader Output WCAG Success Criteria What This Does Not Do Wrap-up…| Adrian Roselli
Once major browsers started supporting & developers immediately started to play with them to see what sorts of patterns they could enhance or replace. This is a good thing. Experimentation pushes boundaries, improves understanding. However, we need to be careful of christening this new-to-us interaction as the solution…| Adrian Roselli
A disclosure widget is a simple control whose sole purpose is to hide or show stuff. Native HTML has one built in via the and elements. Until recently, if you wanted to use it in modern browsers you needed to use a polyfill. In most cases it was…| Adrian Roselli
The Test Page The Code Testing Results Keyboard Screen Readers Voice Control, Forced Colors, Speed Media Queries: 20 December 2023 Audio Description: 20 December 2023 Wrap-up Browsers each provide built-in video players for the element. Nearly four years ago Scott Vinkle wrote How accessible is the HTML video player?,…| Adrian Roselli
