edit text blank – Inputs & Accessibility

A presentation at Berlin.JS in February 2020 in Berlin, Germany by Oscar

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edit text blank Accessibility, Inputs & JavaScript tournant I think we need to talk about accessibility more broadly Oscar, he/him Tournant

https://r.ovl.design/bjs-200220 Slides, Resources & Co. Twitter: @_ovlb

WAI W3C Web Accessibility Initiative https://www.w3.org/WAI/ Group of authors in W3C working improving accessibility in websites

ARIA Accessible Rich Internet Applications https://www.w3.org/WAI/standards-guidelines/aria/ A Specification «These semantics are designed to allow an author to properly convey user interface behaviors and structural information to assistive technologies in document-level markup.»

«WAI-ARIA provides a collection of accessibility states and properties […].» ARIA https://www.w3.org/TR/wai-aria/#usage which are used to support platform accessibility APIs on various operating system platforms Markup static, ARIA allows developers to change things dynamically. Hence the rich

WCAG Web Content Accessibility Guidelines https://www.w3.org/WAI/standards-guidelines/wcag/ Define Success Criteria Show Techniques

A11Y Shorthand for accessibility Eleven letters between a and y Term itself is not undisputed in the accessibility community

«The power of the Web is in its universality. Access by everyone regardless of disability is an essential aspect.» Tim Berners-Lee, 1997 https://www.w3.org/Press/IPO-announce When the W3C launched the Web Accessibility Initiative

«Users with disabilities would expect to encounter detectable errors on 1 in every 13 elements with which they engage.» The WebAIM Million – Errors and Error Density https://webaim.org/projects/million/ 97.8% of home pages had detectable WCAG 2 failures! Accessibility is a topic incredibly hard to test automatically WCAG conformant sites probably under 1 %

These are very basic things Mostly easy to fix Alt text for large publications requires a team effort, especially if it is missing for a long time

🙈 24% of organisations think they are WCAG compliant

👨👨👨👨👨👨👨👨👨👨 Mostly white, male and able-bodied

It’s not us. It’s society. But also us. We are privileged We are responsible for what we do with it

«Privilege is not my fault. But it is my responsibility.» Tatiana Mac https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hzs_8e3Xhhc

Complexity Over time websites have evolved from a medium to exchange scientific papers to one in which you can do basically anything These are the things that are – more often than not – not easy to fix

Accessibility is no rocket science. And everybody benefits. Some things are hard, yes. But let’s get the basics right.

WE NEED TO ACT. If we don’t want to look like a bunch of overpaid bollocks. Get people involved in web dev Listen to those who speak up

COLLABORATION On your own, understanding the ARIA and WCAG pages can be daunting

«The only way this work gets done is if we start small, and if we work together.» Ethan Marcotte – The web we broke https://ethanmarcotte.com/wrote/the-web-we-broke/ He asked the question «What’s one thing I wish I understood better about accessibility?»

USE SEMANTIC MARKUP. And ARIA where applicable. The first rule of ARIA is «Do not use ARIA» e.g. buttons «ARIA, the language created to help make interfaces more accessible, was found on more than sixty percent of the home pages surveyed. Unfortunately, those home pages were more likely to have detectable accessibility errors.» Ethan Marcotte citing from AIM 1 million

USE ASSISTIVE TECHNOLOGY. Start small, by clicking around and listen to the SR output Start navigating around with your keyboard Close your eyes

ASK USERS. They are the experts. Nothing about us without us Be humble We are not able to say what works, e.g. steep wheelchair ramp

PUT ACCESSIBILITY IN THE DEFINITION OF DONE … and be it your own. That means things you are going to do. It’s impossible to just make a whole existing site accessible. Try to get the people you are reporting aboard and agree

https://playground.owlish.dev/inclusive-inputs/

«59% of the 3.4 million form inputs identified were unlabeled (either via <label>, aria-label, or aria-labelledby).» The WebAIM Million – Form Labeling https://webaim.org/projects/million/#labels «The presence of unlabeled form controls was a strong indicator of broader errors—pages with at least one missing form label averaged nearly 30 more errors than those without any label errors.» Past interfaces I built are full of errors, present ones probably too

Structure taken from an online course Not everything is just divs

DON’T MAKE YOUR USERS GUESS. Unless you write the crosswords for the New York Times.

ACCESSIBLE ICON BUTTONS https://www.sarasoueidan.com/blog/accessible-icon-buttons/

aria-hidden Hide an element from Assistive Technology

HIDING ELEMENTS FROM SCREEN READERS USING aria-hidden https://www.accessibility-developer-guide.com/examples/sensible-aria-usage/hidden/

Source: Scott O’Hara – Inclusively Hidden https://www.scottohara.me/blog/2017/04/14/inclusively-hidden.html

REQUIRED ATTRIBUTE REQUIREMENTS https://developer.paciellogroup.com/blog/2019/02/requiredattribute-requirements/

And with this problem we leave the realm of native HTML

aria-describedby Describe an element using the text content of another aria-describedby, provides the means to associate an element with the text of another object, or objects, in the document. When properly used, this attribute can provide the necessary information to assist in creating inclusive user experiences.»

DESCRIBING aria-describedby https://developer.paciellogroup.com/blog/2018/09/describing-aria-describedby/ Scott O’Hara

https://www.ovl.design/text/inclusive-inputs/

Unbreak the web. tournant https://ui.tournant.dev @tournantdev ♡

Oscar
@ovl

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At the end of February, WebAIM published The WebAIM Million, an accessibility analysis of the homepages of the one million most visited websites.

The findings are depressing. The average site contained about 60 errors. Things went even more downhill when putting JS frameworks in the equation. As a reaction to those findings, this talk tries to shed light on some accessibility best practices regarding accessible inputs, as well as do soulsearching why we, as developers, have failed so badly.

Resources

The following resources were mentioned during the presentation or are useful additional information.

W3C Web Accessibility Initiative

Homepage of the WAI
Accessible Rich Internet Applications

Index of the ARIA specification
Web Content Accessibility Guidelines

Success Criteria and Techniques for accessible websites
World Wide Web Consortium Launches International Program Office for Web Accessibility Initiative

W3C press release on the launch of the Web Accessibility Initiative in 1997.
Twitter thread on a Web Key IT survey

Amanda Mace reports on perceived accessibility by organisations
How Privilege Defines Performance

Talk by Tatiana Mac on understanding and questioning privilege as well as an important call for inclusion and equality. Must watch. Seriously.
Web Accessibility In Context

How do browsers and HTML support screen readers today? In this article, Be Birchall explains why it’s so important to prioritize accessibility among teams and why there needs to be more awareness raised among developers. Lack of awareness and prioritization, rather than any technical limitation, is currently the main barrier to an accessible web.
Getting Started with Website Accessibility

Website accessibility is a buzzword these days, but not everyone has a firm grasp on what that term means. So what is website accessibility? Who is in need of accessible websites? And why should you as a website designer/developer/content creator even care?
Semantics to Screen Readers

A detailed explanation how HTML semantics are propagated to Assistive Technology
The web we broke

Ethan Marcotte’s well-written and important response to the WebAIM finding. Including the conclusion that «[t]he only way this work gets done is if we start small, and if we work together.»
Fighting uphill

Another example published in response to WebAIM’s findings, calling for developers to keep advocating accessibility.
Web Key IT

Accessibility consultancy in Australia
The A11y Project

A collection of tips, tests and patterns to build accessible interfaces.
Some Accessibility Resources

Scott O’Hara compiled a list of resources, which is well worth digging into. Loads of valuable stuff in there.
A11Y Style Guide

A base styleguide/pattern library/baseline.
Inclusive Components

A blog trying to be a pattern library. All about designing inclusive web interfaces, piece by piece.
Inclusive Design Patterns

Written by Heydon Pickering, this book contains some valuable examples, especially if you are starting to build inclusive interfaces.
Reach UI

Ryan Florence’s project, trying to build an accessible library to build React applications upon.
Tournant UI

Inclusive Vue component library in the making.
Accessible App

Patterns & strategies for accessible web-apps. Maintained by Marcus Herrmann.
Accessible routing with vue.js

Routing using Vue router isn’t accessible out-of-the-box. Marcus Herrmann shows how to improve on this.
Deque University

Deque University offers training for every level of expertise and every area expertise in digital accessibility.
axe for Web

An open source accessibility rules library for automated testing. Integrate accessibility into your existing testing environment.
Axess Lab

Digital accessibility consultants and products
A11y Weekly

A weekly newsletter on all things accessibility.
a11y Slack

An amazingly helpful community about all things web accessibility.
Getting Started with Web Accessibility in Vue

Good introduction on some basics for accessibility in Vue apps.
Getting started with OS X VoiceOver
Creating accessible input errors and help text

The article on which I based my implementation, written by James Jacobs on the Pulsar blog.
Inclusive Inputs

My write-up of the discussed enhancements
Inclusive Inputs Demo Page

Website showing the discussed combinations one by one
Using label elements to associate text labels with form controls

WCAG technique describing the usage of labels
Accessible Icon Buttons

The definitive guide on making icon buttons accessible, written by Sara Soueidan.
Hiding elements from screen readers using aria-hidden

Intro to using aria-hidden.
Inclusively Hidden

Extensive guide on different techniques to hide content.
Required Attribute Requirements

If you want to use required with your input elements, make sure to take the findings of this article into consideration.
Describing aria-describedby

Usage guide for aria-describedby.
Using the aria-describedby property to provide a descriptive label for user interface controls

The purpose of this technique is to demonstrate how to use the WAI-ARIA aria-describedby property to provide programmatically determined, descriptive information about a user interface element.
@tournant/input

NPM package of the discussed input implementation.

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