It seems like just yesterday that I was posting about Accessibility Show #3, but I guess that was already a month ago. Where did the time go…

Well, January was a very long month…

Show number four is all about cookie consent forms – but before I dive into commenting about those, I want to talk briefly about newsletter signup forms. Normally, the first topic of the show is a positive report on whatever I panned in the previous show…but we didn’t do that this time. The main reason for that? I didn’t find one.

Now, I will freely admit that finding one was dependent on certain restrictions: first, I limit the scope of my test samples to the WordPress Showcase. So there are only about 100 sites for me to pick from. Second, I’m not actually going to look at every site… who has time for that? But I did look at 25 of them to try and find a good example, and in the approximately 20 of those sites that had newsletter signup forms, not one of them was good enough for me to include. That was honestly a bit disconcerting.

Back to the topic of show number four. Cookie consent forms are pretty crucial on the modern web. Thanks for a variety of privacy laws, websites around the world are expected to provide disclosure about how they use cookies and allow you to opt out of anything that isn’t critical to the function of the site.

That is to say: cookies are something that sites are legally obligated to inform users about, and also something that users must be able to opt out of. That’s all users, which very definitely includes people with disabilities, in case I wasn’t sufficiently clear.

If a cookie consent form isn’t accessible, then that site is not meeting its legal obligations (not a lawyer, not providing legal advice.)

I chose four sites, each using a different interface, and none of them were accessible. Most of them had some aspects that made a clear attempt at accessibility, and certain aspects were actually just fine – but every one of them had some key points that were significant failures.

For all the details, watch the episode. I’m going to start looking for a good example of a cookie consent form in the showcase…I think I’ll need to budget more time for that than I did for newsletter forms!