In this blog post, I highlight my special relationship to Braille displays of the Handy Tech brand. The occasion is an anniversary.| Marco's Accessibility Blog
In this post, I discuss some aspects of my migration of this blog from WordPress to Ghost, and what pitfalls I encountered.| Marco's Accessibility Blog
This blog has launched on a new platform. Find out a bit about the background and motivation in this post.| Marco's Accessibility Blog
The focus of this blog is changing| Marco's Accessibility Blog
Gutenberg 7.2 has just been released as a plugin. The development cycle was longer than usual. As a result, this version contains a lot of changes. Several of them improve Gutenberg’s accessibility.| Marco's Accessibility Blog
Merry Christmas, everyone!| Marco's Accessibility Blog
Happy Chanukka| Marco's Accessibility Blog
WordPress accessibility team member, Gutenberg contributor| Marco's Accessibility Blog
If you’re one of those types who likes to visually twist, rotate or tweak some text, in previous years the only real choice was to use pictures to achieve such visual effects. However, thanks to CSS3 transforms, supported in Firefox 3.5 and later, Safari 3 and later, and Opera 10 beta, it is now possible to use plain text and rotate, twist and tweak its looks via CSS. The big advantage: Screen readers will still read the text OK because their reading order is not influenced by the visual ap...| Marco's Accessibility Blog
On sale until December 31st: Threema seriously secure messaging| Marco's Accessibility Blog
The new WordPress block editor is also available in the WordPress app for iOS and Android. It uses the same basis as the editor on a self-hosted or hosted WordPress site, but is a bit simplified. And it is accessible. Here are a few quick tips to get around it.| Marco's Accessibility Blog
Last week, I got my set of AirPods Pro. And after using them for a few days in various situations, can say: Best active noise cancelling headphones I’ve ever used!| Marco's Accessibility Blog
Over the weekend, this post by Dave Rupert made the rounds, and I totally agree with what he is saying.| Marco's Accessibility Blog
The Number 15| Marco's Accessibility Blog
Some fixes in Accessibility Inspector in Firefox 72| Marco's Accessibility Blog
Late in November, I published a personal opinion on the state of Gutenberg accessibility. Today, I’d like to give an introduction to Gutenberg from a screen reader user perspective.| Marco's Accessibility Blog
TL;DR: As a rule of thumb, if you label something via aria-label or aria-labelledby, make sure it has a proper widget or landmark role.| Marco's Accessibility Blog
Happy birthday, Mom!| Marco's Accessibility Blog
mailbox.org is giving new customers €6 until Jan 10, 2020| Marco's Accessibility Blog
NVDA 2019.3 beta 1 has been released today. It is a huge milestone in the history of this free and open-source screen reader.| Marco's Accessibility Blog
Since the update from October 2018, (Version 1809), Windows 10 has had an extended clipboard feature. Here’s how you turn it on and use it.| Marco's Accessibility Blog
Some of you may have noticed that since May, my blog is displaying ads here and there. It was kind of an experiment, and here are my conclusions after six months.| Marco's Accessibility Blog
Do's and don'ts on Hamburger menus| Marco's Accessibility Blog
Quickly bringing up context menus in VoiceOver in iOS 13.2| Marco's Accessibility Blog
A good read: How to make ads responsive| Marco's Accessibility Blog
Today marks my 12th anniversary working for Mozilla. I started on December 3, 2007, as a contractor, and moved to a full employment 13 months later, in January 2009. So in January this year, I was employed there 10 years.| Marco's Accessibility Blog
This year, I am noticing an increased number of sentimental waves, as well as an unusually strong afinity towards the Christmas holiday season.| Marco's Accessibility Blog
A curious web standards celebration| Marco's Accessibility Blog
Since its debut in Firefox 61, the Accessibility Inspector in the Firefox Developer Tools has evolved from a low-level tool showing the accessibility structure of a page. In Firefox 70, the Inspector has become an auditing facility to help identify and fix many common mistakes and practices that reduce site accessibility. In this post, I will offer an overview of what is available in this latest release.| Marco's Accessibility Blog
Navigating in the Firefox toolbars using the keyboard| Marco's Accessibility Blog
I have, for the most part, remained silent about the whole WordPress Gutenberg accessibility topic. Others who are closer to the project have been very vocal about it, and continue to do so. However, after a period of sickness, and now returning to more regular blogging, I feel the time has come to break that silence.| Marco's Accessibility Blog
In recent months, you may have come across the name Mastodon here and there. Especially two weeks ago, when Twitter again made headlines with some, possibly politically motivated, account suspensions that resulted in an influx of users from India to the federated network. Time to look at it a bit, also with regards to accessibility.| Marco's Accessibility Blog
Firefox 70, released in October, contains a new feature called the Protection Report. It contains a graph of all the things Firefox protected you from in the last seven days. Here’s how I made that screen reader accessible.| Marco's Accessibility Blog
My extended advent calendar| Marco's Accessibility Blog
In November of 2018, I started a third attempt at switching to Android as my primary mobile operating system. This time, the experiment lasted 9 months. But I switched back to iOS nevertheless.| Marco's Accessibility Blog
Nolan Lawson shares what he has learned about accessibility| Marco's Accessibility Blog
The WAI-ARIA standard defines a number of related menu roles. However, before using them, please give great consideration to the implications.| Marco's Accessibility Blog
Sara Soueidan on designing a switch control| Marco's Accessibility Blog
In WAI-ARIA 1.1, the aria-roledescription attribute has been added to give web authors the ability to further describe the function of a widget. Here are a few tips for usage.| Marco's Accessibility Blog
In recent months, I have discovered a tendency within myself that longs for more focused, hassle-free environments or niches, where distractions are reduced to a minimum, and I can immerse myself in one thing, and one thing only. And that has lead to rediscovering the merits of some blindness-specific products.| Marco's Accessibility Blog
The built-in Firefox Developer Tools just received a new family member. The Accessibility Inspector allows you to inspect your website’s exposure to assistive technologies.| Marco's Accessibility Blog
For the past 18 years, screen readers on Windows have had a particular way of presenting web content to their users. This model no longer scopes well in light of modern web applications and dynamically changing web sites. The model, therefore, needs to be reimagined and modernized.<!— more —>| Marco's Accessibility Blog
As you may or may not have heard, Firefox 49 supports the HTML5 <details> and <summary> elements. Both full keyboard support and support for assistive technologies is also available right from the start.| Marco's Accessibility Blog
A few months ago, I wrote about the efforts to make the built-in Firefox developer tools more accessible. That work started in January and is now carrying first far-reaching fruits. Here’s an update!| Marco's Accessibility Blog
On March 29, 2016, Twitter announced that description of images is now available when tweeting photos. This helps first and foremost the blind and visually impaired who cannot see images, but may also help people with certain cognitive disabilities who cannot interpret photos, but can make use of descriptions. Here’s how describing your tweeted images works!| Marco's Accessibility Blog
Have you also noticed an increased buzz around Microsoft’s accessibility efforts lately? You probably have if you, like me, are on Twitter and other social media channels and are following the MSFTEnable Twitter account. But in case you haven’t, here are some exciting pointers for you to keep an eye on.| Marco's Accessibility Blog
In the first quarter of 2016, Yura, who is part of the accessibility team at Mozilla, and I are starting on a journey to make the firefox developer tools accessible. The majority of the tools are currently a very mouse-driven environment, and our goal is to make them equally accessible for keyboard users and those using assistive technologies such as screen readers. This blog post marks the beginning of that journey.| Marco's Accessibility Blog
After my report on the accessibility of the IRCCloud IRC client, but also in general, the question of how accessible the Slack team communication service is, has come up time and again. Here’s my observation after trying it out. This article was last updated in May 2019.| Marco's Accessibility Blog
In recent months, I’ve started using the IRCCloud service for all my communication via Internet Relay Chat (IRC). We use IRC at Mozilla, and many other open source projects as well as the W3C use IRC for their instant communication needs.| Marco's Accessibility Blog
After ten months in development, Mozilla today released Firefox for iOS worldwide. Firefox for iOS is bringing your synchronized bookmarks, history and other information associated with your Firefox account to the iOS platform. Moreover, it is also going to record pages you visit in your history and sync these back to your Firefox on Windows, Linux, Mac, and even Android devices.| Marco's Accessibility Blog
Regular readers of my blog may remember my January 2014 shout out to Microsoft for implementing great accessibility in their Office Online offering. Later in the year, I also gave an overview over the accessibility in Google apps. Now, in late April 2015, it is time for an update, since both have made progress. We will also take a look at what has changed in Apple’s iCloud on the web suite, and I’ll introduce an open-source alternative that is ramping up to becoming more accessible.| Marco's Accessibility Blog
This post originally was written in December 2011 and had a slightly different title. Fortunately, the landscape has changed dramatically since then, so it is finally time to update it with more up to date information.| Marco's Accessibility Blog
One question that came up more and more in recent months is how to create an accessible modal dialog with WAI-ARIA. So without further ado, here’s my take on the subject!| Marco's Accessibility Blog
Blog change: Now using encrypted connections| Marco's Accessibility Blog
Quickly check your website for common accessibility problems with tenon.io| Marco's Accessibility Blog
This post was originally published in January of 2015, and has last been updated on April 10, 2015, with latest information on the mentioned problems in light of the OS X 10.10.3 and iOS 8.3 releases from April 8, 2015.| Marco's Accessibility Blog
Inspired by this public discussion on Asa Dotzler’s Facebook wall, I reflected on my own current use cases of web applications, native mobile apps, and desktop clients. I also thought about my post from 2012 where I asked the question whether web apps are accessible enough to replace desktop clients any time soon.| Marco's Accessibility Blog
Your must read post for this week| Marco's Accessibility Blog
Started a 30 days with Android experiment| Marco's Accessibility Blog
Just over a year ago, I conducted an experiment to see whether it would be possible for me to switch to an Android device full-time for my productive smartphone needs. The conclusion back then was that there were still too many things missing for me to productively switch to Android without losing key parts of my day to day usage.| Marco's Accessibility Blog
I recently said that I would write a blog series about Google apps accessibility, providing some hints and caveats when it comes to using Google products such as GMail, Docs, and Drive in a web browser.| Marco's Accessibility Blog
After my recent post about WAI-ARIA, which was mostly geared towards web developers, I was approached by more than one person on Twitter and elsewhere suggesting I’d do a blog post on what it means for screen reader users.| Marco's Accessibility Blog
On Monday this week, Heydon Pickering brought to my attention that Firefox has a problem with the way it handles the aria-pressed attribute in some circumstances. aria-pressed is used on buttons (or elements that have a WAI-ARIA role of “button”) to turn it into a toggle button which can be either pressed or not. Think of the Bold, Italic, etc. toolbar buttons in your favorite word processor as an example.| Marco's Accessibility Blog
On March 20, 2014, the W3C finally published the WAI-ARIA standard version 1.0. After many years of development, refinement and testing, it is now a web standard.| Marco's Accessibility Blog
One question that comes up quite frequently is the one of which roles to use for an auto-complete widget, or more precisely, for the container and the individual auto-complete items. Here’s my take on it: Let’s assume the following rough scenario (note that the auto-complete you have developed may or may not work in the same, but a similar way):| Marco's Accessibility Blog
Today, on February 26, the TinyMCE team released version 4.17 of the JavaScript/HTML editor for the web. In the release notes, the first item mentioned is much improved accessibility support. For those of you not familiar with TinyMCE: It is the WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get), AKA visual or rich editor used in many popular content management systems such as the WordPress blogging software.| Marco's Accessibility Blog
Prompted by the recent Microsoft and GW Micro partnership announcement, I took a long overdue look at Microsoft’s Office 365 product offerings. The Home Premium edition not only gives you five installations of full Office Professional versions in your household, Windows and Mac combined, but also the apps for iOS and Android on up to five mobile devices, extra SkyDrive cloud storage space, and access to the Office in the browser offerings. Considering the cost of shelf Office products, the ...| Marco's Accessibility Blog
On Nov 20, 1983, Borland released Turbo Pascal 1.0. At a price of revolutionary 50 us$, developers received the world’s first fully integrated development environment (IDE) for the PC. It combined the compiler and code editor, and later also debugger, in a package that ran as a single program and didn’t require developers to go in and out of different applications under MS-DOS constantly, immensely increasing productivity.| Marco's Accessibility Blog
Ever since I joined Twitter in March of 2008, at my first CSUN under the Mozilla banner, Twitter’s own web presence was always a bit, or even a lot, of a challenge to use for me as a screen reader user. While the initial version was still pretty straight-forward, as time went by and Twitter added more features and turned their web presence into a web app, the interaction became increasingly cumbersome. Fortunately, there are clients on various platforms that allowed me to access the service...| Marco's Accessibility Blog
Yes, that’s right, I grudgingly accept the fact that aria-hidden is here, and most probably here to stay. Those of you who know me and have been involved in discussions with me, like poor Victor Tsaran, whom I pestered more than once to give me tangible evidence that aria-hidden solves problems normal visibility techniques don’t, know that I’ve been always a strong opponent to give web developers that much power over the accessibility tree. Unlike role “presentation”, which marks on...| Marco's Accessibility Blog
In December 2011, I wrote this overview of the accessibility of social network sites and apps, and I had to paint a rather sad picture about most of the accessibility experiences. As time went by, some things improved here and there, others stalled.| Marco's Accessibility Blog
On may 27 and 28, I attended the Beyond Tellerrand 2013 conference. Tellerrand is the German word for “edge of a plate”. The conference is targeted primarily at web developers and designers, but provides many tracks that look way beyond the edge of the plate of their daily work. It was my first time attending, and the third incarnation of this conference as a whole.| Marco's Accessibility Blog
It often happens that designers and web developers agree on the fact that they do not like the standard buttons or the styling capabilities of buttons in browsers. To work around this, they then resort to what’s called clickable text. It is in many cases a simple span or div element with some funky styling that makes it look like a button with some fancy twists. A JavaScript click handler then does the magic behind the scenes that happens if the user clicks on that particular styled text wi...| Marco's Accessibility Blog
A few weeks ago, I decided to conduct an experiment. I wanted to determine if Android 4.2.2 “Jelly Bean” was finally ready for me to switch to full-time, away from an iPhone.| Marco's Accessibility Blog
In this blog post, I’d like to recap an experience I just had while trying to apply some accessibility enhancements to the NoodleApp app.net client.| Marco's Accessibility Blog
The following article will describe how to properly create accessible tabs in web apps. This is important for both mobile and desktop web applications. Tabs are not native to HTML5, so if you simulate them, you’ll probably use other markup such as lists and list items to generate them. You will have to add WAI-ARIA markup to make these semantically correct. For non-touch-screen interfaces, you’ll also have to add keyboard support manually to make sure the experience is consistent with nat...| Marco's Accessibility Blog
Twitter is often a place of small, but thought-provoking bits of information or personal impression. Just today, Mick Curran, one of the NVDA core developers, tweeted this:| Marco's Accessibility Blog
Exactly on this day five years ago, on Monday, December 3, 2007, I started work at Mozilla as the QA engineer for Accessibility. I’d like to take this small anniversary to look back and look ahead.| Marco's Accessibility Blog
A top 100 killer web accessibility blog| Marco's Accessibility Blog
On October 25, I took part in the 2012 Accessibility Day A-Tag 2012, in Vienna, Austria. This semi-annual event brings together people of various technology fields and organisations as well as end users with disabilities to exchange, share, and get updated on the latest developments in accessibility. This year’s motto was “mobile accessibility”, and with Mozilla’s recent mobile efforts like Firefox for Android and Firefox OS, this was a perfect venue to share and get feedback about ou...| Marco's Accessibility Blog
There are those days when you watch a discussion unfold on Twitter, and a point is reached where a statement is made that leaves you more or less speechless for a while.| Marco's Accessibility Blog
I know, reflections on things usually happen at years-end time, but to be honest, this blog post has been in my head for the last two-and-a-half years, and has thus “seen” a number of year-ends, so I felt that it’s now finally time to put it in writing.| Marco's Accessibility Blog
This blog post is once again prompted by something I encountered in the wild. The other day, I was testing browserid.org‘s account manager for accessibility and encountered some inconsistencies in keyboard navigation and screen reader usage. For one, there are “edit” buttons next to the “Your E-Mail addresses” and “Password” headings whose usability wasn’t obvious to me. To my screen reader, the “remove” buttons next to the e-mail addresses linked to my account, as well as...| Marco's Accessibility Blog
For this, screen readers especially on Windows have adopted a two-part user interaction model: virtual cursor or browse modeThis is the mode screen readers especially on Windows operate in when the user browses a web page. The term virtual cursor has been used since its inception in 1999 because this feels to the user like a document in, for example, WordPad or MS Word. The user walks the document using the arrow keys and has the text to them read via the speech synthesizer. In addition, sema...| Marco's Accessibility Blog
Did I ever mention that I love the community, and I love operating systems with truly inclusive design?! Well, now you know! Here’s a little story that took place in the last half hour:| Marco's Accessibility Blog
Quick tip: Handling the sub menus in the WordPress 3.3 admin area with a screen reader| Marco's Accessibility Blog
Over the weekend, I gave a presentation at the German Multimediatreff. I talked about how to make things more accessible by combining HTML5 and WAI-ARIA in smart ways, using HTML5 where available and appropriate, and enhancing the user experience where HTML5 still has gaps in the implementation. This is a recap of what I showed.| Marco's Accessibility Blog
Apple's iOS 4 supports WAI-ARIA landmarks| Marco's Accessibility Blog
From March 22 to 27, the 5th Annual International Technology & Persons with Disabilities Conference took place at the Manchester Grand Hyatt Hotel in San Diego, California. It is most commonly referred to as CSUN 2010.| Marco's Accessibility Blog
In this Easy ARIA tip, I will give you a bit of a hint on how to make not too complex, but still dynamic, menus accessible. We often encounter menus that pop in and out upon a mouse click or activation of an element using the keyboard.| Marco's Accessibility Blog
Yes, they’re back! This is the fourth Easy ARIA Tip in a trilogy of Easy ARIA Tips. 🙂| Marco's Accessibility Blog
This was an issue I ran into today, so thought I’d blog about it.| Marco's Accessibility Blog
Over the past couple of weeks, Alex, David and I have been hard at work refactoring, discussing, and implementing better support for accessible tables in Gecko. Some of this has seen the light in Firefox 3.6alpha, but the heart of the work is currently only in mozilla-central (AKA Firefox 3.7). Update: As of October 29, these changes have also been ported to the Firefox 3.6 AKA the Gecko 1.9.2 branch and will be in the final release of Firefox 3.6. It will not yet appear in the upcoming relea...| Marco's Accessibility Blog
Use CSS3 transforms, makes your pages more accessible!| Marco's Accessibility Blog
Firefox 3.5 has been released, and now it’s time to take a look at what features of WAI-ARIA are being supported by which Windows screen reader. Competition is healthy in this market, and two new screen readers have started supporting Firefox during the 3.5 development cycle: Dolphin’s Hal/SuperNova and Serotek’s System Access (including the free SAToGo offering). So to document the current state of affairs, I’ve taken each one of the following screen readers running on the Windows pl...| Marco's Accessibility Blog
On February 26, 2014, the webAIM project published the results of their 5th screen reader user survey. Two questions were new in this survey that pertain to a recently growing desire of some web developers to know whether they’re dealing with assistive technologies on the other end or not. The results were rather shocking to me as a representative of a browser vendor and experienced assistive technology user:| Marco's Accessibility Blog
When I started making my social media rounds this morning, I came across Jeffrey Zeldman’s call to action for this year’s Blue Beany Day on November 30th. But I respectfully disagree with a number of points he is making in his post about JavaScript frameworks and their accessibility implications.| Marco's Accessibility Blog
In this blog post, I give an introduction to the Matrix communication network and the most popular client named Element. I will show you the main elements of the web and desktop user interface and how you can quickly navigate around it using a screen reader.| Marco's Accessibility Blog
Yes, a bold statement, I know, but this piece by Dr. Elizabeth Fernandez made my conviction even stronger.| Marco's Accessibility Blog
This morning, Victor from payPal and I got into an exchange on Twitter regarding the ChromeVox extension. ChromeVox is a Chrome extension which provides screen reading functionality for blind users. Through keyboard commands, the user can navigate page content by different levels like object by object, heading by heading, form control by form control, etc.| Marco's Accessibility Blog