As of December 2024, you should prefer using for icons and the like, but for non-interactive decorative contexts that don’t need auto-translation, then alternative text on CSS generated content can get the job done. Even if Safari does some interesting things with it. Relying on images that come from…| Adrian Roselli
All Posts Tagged: UX| adrianroselli.com
Every few months there’s another State of Something survey. As of this week, the State of CSS 2025 survey results have just become available and the State of HTML 2025 survey is wrapping up. This post is skewed to those, touches on more, and is rather disjointed. “2012 Oregon City…| Adrian Roselli
Last week while whining about having accessibility contributions to FOSS projects dismissed, I had a Twitter conversation about when the same thing happens with clients. I have a method to deal with that, however, which I briefly outlined on Twitter. I promised to expand on it in a blog post,…| Adrian Roselli
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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
This post only covers my impressions and experiences from CSUNATC. Others probably had dramatically different experiences. Talk Types The talks seemed to fall into three broad categories this year: product pitches, vendor room sessions (which were product and service pitches), and ‘AI’ talks. Vendor Rooms For the most part, if…| 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
All Posts Tagged: WAI| adrianroselli.com
Don’t tell anyone. This may be a secret. But I am really excited, as no person should ever be over something this mundane. Check this out (and then read on for what is happening here): The alt text gives it away, but look in the lower right corner. In the…| Adrian Roselli
In early March, Steve Faulkner shared this nugget for making sub-headings: 👉If you want to semantically identify a heading subtitle, look no further than role="doc-subtitle" w3.org/TR/dpub-aria-1.0/#doc-subtitle #HTML #ARIA #WebDev pic.twitter.com/uaHcVRp6oz Steve Faulkner (@stevefaulkner) March 7, 2020 On its surface it looks pretty handy. Handy enough that Chris Ferdinandi wrote about…| Adrian Roselli
When Rian Rietveld resigned from the WordPress accessibility team on October 9, I decided to track the fallout in an ongoing Twitter thread. The subsequent weeks and days proved to be wonderful insight into how a project can suffer when accessibility is not built in from the start. When subject…| Adrian Roselli
2.5.8 Example| adrianroselli.com
I made a demo for WCAG 2.2 Success Criterion 1.2.5 Audio Description (Prerecorded) AA and have embedded it further down the page. It’s a bit of a download, so either ignore it, be patient, or steal wifi from your local chain restaurant. Conformance Success Criterion 1.2.5 Audio Description (Prerecorded) AA…| Adrian Roselli
I made a demo for WCAG 2.2 Success Criterion 1.4.10 Reflow AA and have embedded it further down the page. Unfortunately it assumes you have the font Impact installed, though in no way does that affect what this post covers. Conformance Success Criterion 1.4.10 Reflow AA without the Notes: Content…| Adrian Roselli
Disclosure in <fieldset>| adrianroselli.com
Mashable bills itself as a social media guide, although it tends to cover Web 2.0 (yes, I am still not a fan of that term), current trends (viral hits and the like), and even a fair amount of randomness. Ben Parr, Mashable’ co-editor, just wrote the article What the Web…| Adrian Roselli
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All Posts Tagged: css| adrianroselli.com
I should clarify that I am not talking about carousels. That said, because users often consider horizontal scrolling containers to be carousels, I will be talking about carousels. Also, this post is written by a monolingual American. While I discuss localization issues, there’s no way I can get into all…| Adrian Roselli
All Posts Tagged: typefaces| adrianroselli.com
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Nine years ago I had become fed up with trying to explain to clients, users, friends, co-workers, and strangers that screen resolution, browser chrome, and browser size combine to create some unique viewport sizes. What this meant was that whether a user had a display at 640×480 or at 1,024×768…| Adrian Roselli
I can’t actually assert the ARTY overlay will result in a lawsuit, though there is a trend of overlays attracting lawsuits. Attorneys say overlays don’t protect from lawsuits, either. Regardless of the company making it, if you wonder if you should use an accessibility overlay, the answer is no. ARTY’s…| Adrian Roselli
I can’t actually assert the Accesstive overlay will result in a lawsuit, though there is a trend of overlays attracting lawsuits. Attorneys say overlays don’t protect from lawsuits, either. Regardless of the company making it, if you wonder if you should use an accessibility overlay, the answer is no. Accesstive’s…| 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
Creating an accessible dialog on the web is trickier than it should be. Lack of support for the| 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
All Posts Tagged: Twitter| adrianroselli.com
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The Details As of January 18, Juno’s new service agreement has been in effect. As with all service agreements of this nature, they notify you of a change, and if you continue to use the service, you are bound by it. So what? Well, there’s a new feature that Juno…| Adrian Roselli
The Register reports that Canada is dealing with URL disputes by setting up a non-profit organization called the Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA) that will force all .ca domain name holders to re-apply for their domains. This transfers the responsibility for the registry from the volunteer organization at the University…| Adrian Roselli
All Posts Tagged: JavaScript| adrianroselli.com
Hey, Alphabet or Google or Chrome or whomever in that illegal monopoly continues to release things to the web platform that are full of accessibility barriers, I have what I think is a straightforward request. My Request Please, if your team cannot explain how the thing satisfies all WCAG Success…| Adrian Roselli
Got myself one of those Bonne Maman jelly/jam advent calendars and am very much looking forward to opening the first day and all subsequent days. Web developers around the world have given a nod to Saturnalia solstice Isaac Newton’s birthday Christmas with advent calendars covering web-related topics. As a result,…| Adrian Roselli
Moving and Flashing Warning: Each of the examples in this post has animations. Continuous animations honor your system settings to reduce animation. You can also hide the rendered HTML in the embedded CodePens by hitting the “Result” control. The CSS background-clip property controls how much a background extends under a…| Adrian Roselli
This is why you never go to the (locally- and independently-owned) grocery store on an empty stomach. Web developers around the world have celebrated Saturnalia solstice Isaac Newton’s birthday Christmas with advent calendars covering web-related topics. As a result, you may recognize some of the ones listed below. Every year…| Adrian Roselli
All Posts Tagged: UX| adrianroselli.com
Abstract for my session Talkin’ Tables: This session will walk through the basics of how to construct an HTML table. More than basic structure, it will talk about support and how it is exposed to screen readers in particular. With that foundation it will walk through patterns for responsive tables,…| Adrian Roselli
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Abstract for my talk Selfish Accessibility: 2025: More than 10 years ago I presented my talk “Selfish Accessibility,” a tongue-in-cheek discussion of how to quietly approach accessibility efforts by appealing to the bosses, clients, and vendors who otherwise might not care about disabled people, the challenges they face, or the…| Adrian Roselli
All Posts Tagged: WCAG| adrianroselli.com
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
WCAG 2.2 is live. Read the W3C’s What’s New in WCAG 2.2 to know what from this wildly outdated post made it into the final spec. The latest (and probably last) WCAG version 2 point release is in draft and the W3C is asking for comments and feedback by 18…| 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
I ran across a survey from Tilburg University on the experiences and perspectives of image describers. It asked what process I follow to write image alternative text, and it occurred to me that I don’t use a checklist or guideline anymore. That may or may not be a good thing,…| Adrian Roselli
It’s weird to me that after I urged everyone not to disable form controls, a bunch of them decided that making them read-only was somehow better. But here we are. What’s in the box? Photo by Michael Heiss, no edits, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0. HTML The readonly attribute is only allowed…| 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
It does, actually. In Firefox. Sometimes. A major risk of using ARIA to define text content is it typically gets overlooked in translation. Automated translation services often do not capture it. Those who pay for localization services frequently miss content in ARIA attributes when sending text strings to localization vendors.…| Adrian Roselli
This image is borrowed from the WebAIM article on Cognitive Disabilities.In the blog post Definitions of “Cognitive Disability” by John Rochford, we can see that it’s not so easy to define the term “cognitive disability.” Given how often this term appears in accessibility statements and requirements for web sites, the…| Adrian Roselli
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Susan Weinschenk, Ph.D. wanted to write an article about why it’s harder to read text set in all-caps than text set as mixed case. The argument for this has centered around how people read words — recognizing a word shape from its letters, whereas an all-caps word has no unique…| Adrian Roselli
Three years ago YouTube/Google added the ability for video authors to add captions to videos. Over time support for multiple caption tracks was included, the expansion of search to consider text in captions, and even machine translation support for the captions (see my other post about machine translation risks).Even with…| 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
Eric tagged me into this chain letter of a post. From what I can glean, you are supposed to steal the headings and treat them as questions. Why did you start blogging in the first place? Three key reasons: So I wouldn’t have to keep repeating myself; to act as…| Adrian Roselli
All Posts Tagged: rant| adrianroselli.com
The Vercel CEO over on the hell-site tweets: v0.dev produces the kind of production-grade code that we'd want to ship in our own @vercel products. That was the bar we set for ourselves. At the moment it can output HTML with @tailwindcss and React w/ @shadcn UI. pic.twitter.com/hWLzpmyaG2 Guillermo Rauch…| Adrian Roselli
Disclaimer: This post and the headline is my opinion. I provide verifiable facts throughout to inform that opinion. I am also not a lawyer, and this post does not constitute legal advice. The content reflects my genuinely held beliefs and opinions. My concern with AudioEye has consistently been with the…| Adrian Roselli
“Tires are foundational to all our concept cars! You can tell because we left a wheel well to hold one!” A common refrain I see from companies is a variation of “Accessibility is a core principle!” They will include it in messaging, brag about their team, talk about how great…| Adrian Roselli
At the start of 2016 I wrote Internet Explorer Does Not Go Away Today because back then IE up to version 11 was being retired. But not Internet Explorer 11. I asked an AI (Neural Blender) to give me a picture of the Internet Explorer logo on fire. It’s almost…| Adrian Roselli
All Posts Tagged: rant| adrianroselli.com
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. Anil Dash posted a story called Life…| Adrian Roselli
TL;DR: anyone promising you that a total solution to digital accessibility is coming, and they are the ones bringing it, may be lying. Background In 2016 I wrote Be Wary of Accessibility Guarantees from Vendors. At the time I was cautioning readers about libraries and frameworks and SaaS and so…| Adrian Roselli
All Posts Tagged: usability| adrianroselli.com
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
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. The proliferation of splash pages on web…| Adrian Roselli
I posted something on Mastodon that uses Unicode math symbols to produce fake bold and fake italic text. I used YayText.com to generate it, but I am not linking it because you I don’t want you to use it. I embedded the post, but you can go to it directly…| Adrian Roselli
LLM-powered chatbots are here to stay. As a result, I am playing around with a disclaimer to recommend for clients. After all, if the LLM says that it’s fine to mix chlorine and ammonia to clean the sink, then that chatbot user needs to be told to probably confirm it…| Adrian Roselli
All Posts Tagged: design| adrianroselli.com
Form ever follows function. Louis Sullivan Louis Sullivan, the father of the modern skyscraper, espoused this belief throughout his work. He recognized that the purpose of the building, when entering a place with no prior art, had to drive how it would look. With both the technology and audience providing…| Adrian Roselli
All Posts Tagged: ARIA| adrianroselli.com
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
If you have little experience with ARIA, screen readers, or testing in general, understanding accessible descriptions can be trickier than understanding accessible names (already confusing for many). I have written explanations so many times for clients and in fora that I opted to put this together so I maybe never…| Adrian Roselli
All Posts Tagged: WCAG| adrianroselli.com
It seems everybody who dabbles in digital accessibility is blogging about WCAG 2.2 now that it finally went live. This is my obligatory post, but I am not promoting it because there is already so much noise and much of the content is regurgitated. If you are not aware, WCAG…| Adrian Roselli
Download a 5.3MB tagged PDF of my slides or try the embedded view if your browser displays PDF inline. I was invited to the 2023 edition of Paris Web as one of two presenters speaking solely English. I did my best to script my talk to hopefully make it easier…| Adrian Roselli
There is a non-zero chance that WCAG Success Criterion 4.1.1 Parsing will go away in WCAG 2.2. This isn’t a problem for users, regardless of the problems it may pose for the WCAG process, ACT rules, automated testing tools, or ossified testing processes. The joke here is using an antique…| Adrian Roselli
All Posts Tagged: UX| adrianroselli.com
There is a very good article over at A List Apart today titled “The Myth of Usability Testing.” The article starts off with an example of how multiple usability evaluation teams, given the same task and allowed to run at it as they saw fit, had far less overlap in…| Adrian Roselli
Sabrina Dent, a web designer hailing from Ireland, has blogged about her struggle with dyslexia and dyscalculia and web applications today in the post, “Dyslexia, Dyscalculia and Design“. For some context, she links to the Wikipedia article on dyscalculia and highlights the bits that apply to her:An inability to read…| Adrian Roselli
All Posts Tagged: UX| adrianroselli.com
Usually. I originally titled this InacCSS-onlyible. I even made this typographically, er, distinct image. Then I realized it was silly and will instead use the neologism in a talk so I can hear the groans IRL. Interactive widgets powered with only CSS are relatively common as people are playing with…| Adrian Roselli
All Posts Tagged: usability| adrianroselli.com
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
All Posts Tagged: standards| adrianroselli.com
Mozilla’s developer blog today posted that they have added support for the Web Open Font Format (WOFF) to Firefox 3.6. Firefox 3.5 gave us support for linking to TrueType and OpenType fonts, but this takes it a step further to support a format that is more robust for two key…| 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. As more and more sites move away…| Adrian Roselli
All Posts Tagged: standards| adrianroselli.com
All Posts Tagged: standards| adrianroselli.com
Now that it is a market differentiator to talk about accessibility in projects, that’s all many do — talk about it. In a sea of pop-dev noise, “accessibility” can be claimed with little risk someone will challenge it. If someone does, the response is often a fine balance between silence…| Adrian Roselli
